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The first global study of the distinctive Korean soju, tracing cross-cultural exchanges and Korea's place in Eurasian history.
This is the first anthology of its kind in English that deals in depth with the translation of Chinese texts, literary and philosophical, into a host of Western and Asian languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, Slovak and Korean. After an introduction by the editor, in which multiple translations are compared to the many lives lived by the original in its new incarnations, 13 articles are presented in 3 sections.
For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order. Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Chosŏn’s rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Chosŏn drew on classical...
Analysing a series of narratives that described women who transformed the worlds they lived in, this book introduces students and scholars to the lives of the women of Joseon Korea 1550-1700. Exploring their interactions both at home and abroad, this book shows how the agency of these women reached far across the globe The narratives explored here appeared in a wide range of written, visual and material forms, from woodcuts and printed texts, letters, journals, and chronicles to inscriptions on monuments, and were produced by Joseon’s elite officials, grieving families, Japanese civic administrators, Jesuit missionaries, local historians of the Japanese ceramic industry, and men of the Dut...
In Engraving Virtue, Young Kyun Oh investigates the publishing history of the Samgang Haengsil-to (Illustrated Guide to the Three Relations), a moral primer of Chosŏn (1392–1910), and traces the ways in which woodblock printed books contributed to shaping premodern Korea. Originally conceived by the court as a book with which to instill in its society Confucian ethics encased in the stories of moral heroes and heroines as filial sons, loyal subjects, and devoted wives, the Samgang Haengsil-to embodies various aspects of Chosŏn society. With careful examinations of its various editions and historical documents, Oh presents how the life of this book reflected the complicated factors of the Chosŏn society and how it became more than just a reading material.
During the Manchu conquest of China (1640s–1680s), the Qing government mandated that male subjects shave their hair following the Manchu style. It was a directive that brought the physical body front and center as the locus of authority and control. Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers’ memories of lived experiences during the Ming–Qing cataclysm. For traditional Chinese men of letters, the body was an anchor of sensory perceptions and emotions. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events, unveiling how writers participated in an actual and imagined community of like-minded li...
This is the first book to examine Chinese poetry and courtier culture using the concept of shengse—sound and sight—which connotes "sensual pleasure." Under the moral and political imperative to avoid or even eliminate representations of sense perception, premodern Chinese commentators treated overt displays of artistry with great suspicion, and their influence is still alive in modern and contemporary constructions of literary and cultural history. The Yongming poets, who openly extolled "sound and rhymes," have been deemed the main instigators of a poetic trend toward the sensual. Situating them within the court milieu of their day, Meow Hui Goh asks a simple question: What did shengse mean to the Yongming poets? By unraveling the aural and visual experiences encapsulated in their poems, she argues that their pursuit of "sound and sight" reveals a complex confluence of Buddhist influence, Confucian value, and new sociopolitical conditions. Her study challenges the old perception of the Yongming poets and the common practice of reading classical Chinese poems for semantic meaning only.
This book is a comparative exploration of the impact of a celebrated Chinese historical novel, the Sanguozhi yanyi (Three Kingdoms) on the popular culture of Korea since its dissemination in the sixteenth century. It elucidates not only the reception of Chinese fiction in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), but also the fascinating ways in which this particular story lives on in modern Korea. The author specifically explores the dissemination, adaptations, and translations of the work to elucidate how Three Kingdoms has spoken to Korean readers. In short, this book shows how a quintessentially Chinese work equally developed into a Korean work.
Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia--not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. Peter Kornicki takes the reader from the early centuries of the common era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it s...
This book discusses how Western ideas, knowledge, concepts and practices were imported, adapted and even transformed into varied contexts in East Asia. In particular, authors in this rich volume focus on the role translation played in the processes of modernization in China, Japan, and Korea in the 19th and early 20th centuries.