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From the long-stemmed pipe to snuff, the water pipe, hand-rolled cigarettes, and finally, manufactured cigarettes, the history of tobacco in China is the fascinating story of a commodity that became a hallmark of modern mass consumerism. Carol Benedict follows the spread of Chinese tobacco use from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced to China from the New World, through the development of commercialized tobacco cultivation, and to the present day. Along the way, she analyzes the factors that have shaped China’s highly gendered tobacco cultures, and shows how they have evolved within a broad, comparative world-historical framework. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources—gazetteers, literati jottings (biji), Chinese materia medica, Qing poetry, modern short stories, late Qing and early Republican newspapers, travel memoirs, social surveys, advertisements, and more—Golden-Silk Smoke not only uncovers the long and dynamic history of tobacco in China but also sheds new light on global histories of fashion and consumption.
Describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture in Republican era China. This book looks into the lives of some of the opera's key actors, and explores their methods for earning a living, and their status in an ever-changing society.
This collection provides a critical reexamination of the development and current status of comparative literature studies that engage the literary practices of both China and the West. In so doing, it attempts to refashion literary methodologies and cultural theories in Chinese studies and reread several noncanonical texts in ways that cut across disciplines, genders, and modernities. Eschewing conventional taxonomies such as the study of literary influences and parallels, this volume shifts the emphasis from Chinese-Western comparativism to a critical rereading of Chinese or China-related texts using a variety of new critical approaches. Essays that draw on literary history, comparative poe...
In Corporeal Politics, leading international scholars investigate the development of dance as a deeply meaningful and complex cultural practice across time, placing special focus on the intertwining of East Asia dance and politics and the role of dance as a medium of transcultural interaction and communication across borders. Countering common narratives of dance history that emphasize the US and Europe as centers of origin and innovation, the expansive creativity of dance artists in East Asia asserts its importance as a site of critical theorization and reflection on global artistic developments in the performing arts. Through the lens of “corporeal politics”—the close attention to bo...
The Guardian's Best Books of 2015 Most people suppose that the whole world knows what it is to love; that romantic love is universal, quintessentially human. Such a supposition has to be able to meet three challenges. It has to justify its underlying assumption that all cultures mean the same thing by the word ‘love’ regardless of language. It has to engage with the scholarly debate on whether or not romantic love was invented in Europe and is uniquely Western. And it must be able to explain why early twentieth-century Chinese writers claimed that they had never known true love, or love by modern Western standards. By addressing these three challenges through a literary, historical, phil...
This is the second volume of a two-volume social history of nineteenth-century Hankow, a city of over one million inhabitants and the commercial hub of central China. In the first volume, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (1984), the author emphasized the dynamism of late imperial commerce, the relation of the metropolis to its hinterland, and the corporate institutions of the city, notably its guilds, which assumed a number of functions we normally attribute to a municipal government. In this volume, the focus is on the people of Hankow, in all their ethnic diversity, occupational variety, and constant mobility, and on the social bonds that enabled this mass of peopl...
The fields of integer programming and combinatorial optimization continue to be areas of great vitality, with an ever increasing number of publications and journals appearing. A classified bibliography thus continues to be necessary and useful today, even more so than it did when the project, of which this is the fifth volume, was started in 1970 in the Institut fur Okonometrie und Operations Research of the University of Bonn. The pioneering first volume was compiled by Claus Kastning during the years 1970 - 1975 and appeared in 1976 as Volume 128 of the series Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems published by the Springer Verlag. Work on the project was continued by Dirk Hau...
The aim of the book is to present for non-specialist researchers as well as for experts a comprehensive overview of the background, key ideas, basic methods, implementation details and a selection of solutions offered by a novel technology for the optimisation of the location of dangerous offshore activities in terms of environmental criteria, as developed in the course of the BalticWay project. The book consists of two parts. The first part introduces the basic principles of ocean modeling and depicts the long way from the generic principles to the practical modeling of oil spills and of the propagation of other adverse impacts. The second part focuses on the techniques for solving the inve...
Semiannual, with semiannual and annual indexes. References to all scientific and technical literature coming from DOE, its laboratories, energy centers, and contractors. Includes all works deriving from DOE, other related government-sponsored information, and foreign nonnuclear information. Arranged under 39 categories, e.g., Biomedical sciences, basic studies; Biomedical sciences, applied studies; Health and safety; and Fusion energy. Entry gives bibliographical information and abstract. Corporate, author, subject, report number indexes.