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Brushing History Against the Grain
This book explores some essential features of the Chinese new historical fiction (NHF) and its socio-cultural implications. It argues that the NHF constitutes an oppositional discourse that rejects, both the grand narrative of linear (revolutionary) history, which dominates Chinese official historiography, and naïve confidence in 'Chinese modernity.'
Collecting the Self
Chinese strange tale collections contain short stories about ghosts and animal spirits, supra-human heroes and freaks, exotic lands and haunted homes, earthquake and floods, and other perceived “anomalies” to accepted cosmic and social norms. As such, this body of literature is a rich repository of Chinese myths, folklore, and unofficial “histories”. These collections also reflect Chinese attitudes towards normalcy and strangeness, perceptions of civilization and barbarism, and fantasies about self and other. Inspired in part by Freud’s theory of the uncanny, this book explores the emotive subtexts of late imperial strange tale collections to consider what these stories tell us about suppressed cultural anxieties, the construction of gender, and authorial self-identity.
The Eternal Present of the Past
This study draws together various elements in late Ming culture – illustration, theater, literature – and examines their interrelation in the context of the publication of drama. It examines a late Ming conception of the stage as a mystical space in which the past was literally reborn within the present. This temporal conflation allowed the past to serve as a vigorous and immediate moral example and was considered a hugely important mechanism by which the continuity of the Confucian tradition could be upheld. By using theatrical conventions of stage arrangement, acting gesture, and frontal address, drama illustration recreated the mystical character of the stage within the pages of the book, and thus set the conflation of past and present on a broader footing.
Subjective Writing in Contemporary Chinese Literature
Translated from the original French publication, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of 20th century Chinese literature and examines the relationship between Chinese literary theory and modernity. The author surveys the work of leading writers including Zhang Ailing, Beidao, and Mu Dan. The author seeks to answer some fundamental questions in the study of Chinese literary history, such as: How does contemporary Chinese literature go from historical narrative to the narrative of the I, where rhythm and epic merge into writing, and where the instinctive load of the rhythm substantiates the epic? What are the steps and the forms of mediation that allow such a transition? Is the subject the only agent of the transition? What is its status? What is the role of poetic language that led to the birth of the subject and which separates it from empiricism? What are the difficulties faced by Chinese writers today? Young Chinese writers set off in search of a totally new writing to rediscover subjectivity, which is in no way limited to literature; it also covers areas such as the law, and the expression of the I confronted to an overpowering we.
Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China
Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars) is more than a landmark in the history of the Chinese novel. This eighteenth-century work, which was deeply embedded in the intellectual and literary discourses of its time, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. Wu Jingzi’s (1701–54) ironic portrait of literati life was unprecedented in its comprehensive treatment of the degeneration of mores, the predicaments of official institutions, and the Confucian elite’s futile struggle to reassert moral and cultural authority. Like many of his fellow literati, Wu found the vernacul...
Directory of Officials and Organizations in China
This exhaustive cumulative guide covers the changes in key personnel and administrative institutions from 1968 to the present. It traces the career paths of the many high officials within the numerous governmental, military, educational, and economic organizations in China. The directory also provides information on major institutions in China by following the restructuring, division, and mergers of organizations. This new edition includes new sections on trade organizations; special administrative regions; museums, libraries, and galleries; banks and insurance companies; and social and community mass organizations.
Chinese Theories of Fiction
In this innovative work, Ming Dong Gu examines Chinese literature and traditional Chinese criticism to construct a distinctly Chinese theory of fiction and places it within the context of international fiction theory. He argues that because Chinese fiction, or xiaoshuo, was produced in a tradition very different from that of the West, it has formed a system of fiction theory that cannot be adequately accounted for by Western fiction theory grounded in mimesis and realism. Through an inquiry into the macrocosm of Chinese fiction, the art of formative works, and theoretical data in fiction commentaries and intellectual thought, Gu explores the conceptual and historical conditions of Chinese fiction in relation to European and world fiction. In the process, Gu critiques and challenges some accepted views of Chinese fiction and provides a theoretical basis for fresh approaches to fiction study in general and Chinese fiction in particular. Such masterpieces as the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the Hongloumeng (The Story of the Stone) are discussed at length to advance his notion of fiction and fiction theory.
Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou
The Chinese city of Yangzhou has been of great cultural significance for many centuries, despite its destruction by invaders in the 17th and 19th centuries. It was a site of virtual pilgrimage for aspiring members of the Chinese educated class during the Ming and Qing periods. Moreover, because it was one of the foremost commercial centres during the late imperial period, it was the place where the merchant and scholarly classes merged to set new standards of taste and to create a cultural milieu quite unlike that of other cities, even other major centres in the region. The luxurious elegance of its gardens and the eminence of its artistic traditions meant that Yangzhou set aesthetic standards for the entire realm for much of the late imperial age. Over the years, particular regional forms of art and entertainment arose here, too, some surviving into the present time.
Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-Century China
Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-Century China: Plays by Tang Xianzu, Mei Dingzuo, Wu Bing, Li Yu, and Kong Shangren is a full-length study of chuanqi (romance) drama, a sophisticated form with substantial literary and meta-theatrical value that reigned in Chinese theater from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and nourished later theatrical traditions including jingju (Beijing Opera). Highly educated dramatists used chuanqi to present in artistic form personal, social, and political concerns of their time. There were six outstanding examples of these trends, considered masterpieces in their time and ever since. This study presents them in their social and cultural context du...
The Poet-historian Qian Qianyi
Lawrence Yim focuses on Qian’s poetic theory and practice, providing a critical study of his theory of poetic-history (shishi) and poems from the Toubi ji. He also examines the role played by history in early Qing verse, rethinking the nature of loyalism and historical memory in seventeenth-century China.
