Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Inscription of Things
Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written. Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material cu...
Worldly Stage
"In seventeenth-century China, as formerly disparate social spheres grew closer, the theater began to occupy an important ideological niche among traditional cultural elites, and notions of performance and spectatorship came to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. In this study of late-imperial Chinese theater, Sophie Volpp offers fresh readings of major texts such as Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) and Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan), and unveils lesser-known materials such as Wang Jide’s play The Male Queen (Nan wanghou). In doing so, Volpp sheds new light on the capacity of seventeenth-century drama to comment on the cultural politics of...
Genealogical Manuscripts in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Situating the history of genealogy in the ambit of manuscript studies, this volume explores how handwriting practices influenced the development of genealogies. It shows how lineages used handwritten documents in constructing and presenting their identity both to the outside world and to themselves. Genealogical handwriting is practiced in many manuscript cultures; this volume is the first to juxtapose studies from a wide variety of such cultures, ranging from East Asia, to West and Central Asia, to Europe. As the present contributions discuss in depth, tracing one's lineage usually required taking note of personal histories, biographies and relationships; the chapters explore the many diffe...
Uncrossing the Borders
Over many centuries, women on the Chinese stage committed suicide in beautiful and pathetic ways just before crossing the border for an interracial marriage. Uncrossing the Borders asks why this theatrical trope has remained so powerful and attractive. The book analyzes how national, cultural, and ethnic borders are inevitably gendered and incite violence against women in the name of the nation. The book surveys two millennia of historical, literary, dramatic texts, and sociopolitical references to reveal that this type of drama was especially popular when China was under foreign rule, such as in the Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) dynasties, and when Chinese male literati felt desperate about their economic and political future, due to the dysfunctional imperial examination system. Daphne P. Lei covers border-crossing Chinese drama in major theatrical genres such as zaju and chuanqi, regional drama such as jingju (Beijing opera) and yueju (Cantonese opera), and modernized operatic and musical forms of such stories today.
Opera and the City
In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values. It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.
True to Her Word
This path-breaking book examines the broad cultural, social, and gender meanings of the "faithful maiden" cult in late imperial China (1368–1911). Across the empire, an increasing number of young women or "faithful maidens," defied their parents' wishes and chose either to live out their lives as widows upon the death of a fiancé or killed themselves to join their fiancé in death. The book analyzes the familial conflicts, government policies, ideological controversies, and personal emotions surrounding the cult. Concentrating on the dramatic acts of spirit wedding and suicide, the faithful maidens' unique code of conduct, and the extraordinary life journey of "virgin mothers," Lu documents the ideological, psychological, cultural, and economic aspects of these young women's mentality and behavior, and the implications of this behavior for their families and the broader society. The book's narrative of the faithful maiden cult interweaves late imperial political, cultural, social and intellectual history, thus, providing a new window onto the history of the late imperial period.
Corporate Conquests
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, C. Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how entrepreneurs centralized corporate power even as they expanded their businesses througho...
Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China
"Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political play...
Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks
Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks—biological lineages, territorial communities, temples, and festivals—and the state. They did this through their organization in clerical lineages—their own empire-wide networks for channeling knowledge, patronage, and resources—and by controlling central temples that were nodes of local social structures. In this book, the only comprehensive social history of local Daoism during the Ming largely based on literary sources and fieldwork, Richard G. Wang delineates the interface between local organizations (such as line...
Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours
At a time when China-Southeast Asia relationships are undergoing profound changes, it is pleasing to have a volume which examines the interactions between China and the polities and societies to the south through time. With multiple aims of exploring the relations between northern Chinese cultures and those of the south, examining the cultural plurality of areas which are today parts of Southern China, and illuminating the relations between Sinitic and non-Sinitic societies, the volume is broad in concept and content. Within these extensive rubrics, this edited collection further interrogates the nature of Asian polities and their historiography, the constitution of Chineseness, imperial China's southern expansions, cultural hybridity, economic relations, regional systems and ethnic interactions across East Asia. The editors Victor H. Mair and Liam C. Kelley are to be congratulated for bringing together such a wealth of contributions offering nascent interpretations and broad overviews, set within the overarching historical and contemporary contexts provided through Wang Gungwu's introduction.- Dr Geoffrey Wade, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University
