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This volume has its origins in the project "Large-scale Registration of Chinese Storytelling," which involved the recording on film of 360 hours of performances by the four master of Yangzhou storytelling, Dai Buzhang, Fei Zhengliang, Gao Zaihua, and Ren Jitang. Four sets of these films have been deposited (in Washington D.C., Taipei, Beijing, and Copenhagen) so that future generations of scholars will have access to this unique material. With all text appearing in both English and Chinese and with its subject matter brought alive by a wealth of photographs plus a 60-minute film on VCD, this volume promises to be a classic work in its field.
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.
This text examines the traditional oral narrative of the Yangzi delta.
Built on twenty years of fieldwork in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China, this book explores the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nüshu. What drove peasant women to create a script of their own and write, and how do those writings throw new light on how gender is addressed in epistemology and historiography and how the unprivileged social class uses marginalized forms of expression to negotiate with the dominant social structure. Further, how have the politics of salvaging this disappearing centuries-old cultural heritage molded a new poetics in contemporary society? This book explores nüshu in conjunction with the local women's singi...
This collection brings together an international, multicultural, multilingual, and multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners in different media seeking to question and re-theorize the contested terms of our title: “woman,” “writing,” “women’s writing,” and “across.” “Culture” is translated into an open series of interconnected terms and questions. How might one write across national cultures; or across a national and a minority culture; or across disciplines, genres, and media; or across synchronic discourses that are unequal in power; or across present and past discourses or present and future discourses? The collection explores and develops recent feminist, queer, and transgender theory and criticism, and also aesthetic practice. “Writing across” assumes a number of orientations: posthumanist; transtemporal; transnationalist; writing across discourses, disciplines, media, genres, genders; writing across pronouns – he, she, they; writing across literature, non-literary texts, and life. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Time, Consciousness and Writing brings together a collection of critical reflections on Peter Malekin’s “model of the mind”, which he saw as a crucial yet often neglected aspect of critical theory in relation to theatre, literature and the arts. The volume begins with a selection of Peter Malekin’s own writings that lay out his critique of western culture, its overstated claims to universal competence and validity, and lays out an alternative view of consciousness that draws partly on Asian traditions and partly on underground traditions from the west. The essays that follow, commissioned for this volume, critically examine Malekin’s ideas, drawing out their implications in a variety of contexts including theatre, liturgical performance, poetry and literature. The book ends with an assessment of future prospects opened by this work.
Akiko Yosano's Tangled Hair, published in 1901, had a sensational impact on Japanese literature, and we are pleased to make this highly praised translation (originally published 30 years a
Follow the brilliant and hilarious adventures of the Zen Buddhist monk who became one of China's greatest folk heroes! During the Song Dynasty (960-1279), Ji Gong studied at the renowned Ling Yin monastery, nestled in the steep hills above Hangzhou. The Chan (Zen) Buddhist masters of the temple tried to instruct Ji Gong in the spartan practices of their sect, but the young monk, following in the footsteps of other great ne'er-do-wells, distinguished himself mainly by getting expelled. He left the monastery, became a wanderer with hardly a proper piece of clothing to wear, and achieved significant renown--in seedy wine shops and drinking establishments! That could have been where Ji Gong's st...
The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre, a prosimetric narrative in vernacular language, first appeared around the fourteenth century and endures as a living tradition. In exploring the evolution of the Mulian story, Rostislav Berezkin illuminates changes in the literary and religious characteristics of the genre. He also examines material from other forms of Chinese literature and from modern performances of baojuan, tracing their transformation from tools of Buddhist proselytizing to sectarian propaganda to folk ritualized storytelling. Ultimately, he reveals the special features of baojuan as a type of performance literature that had its foundations in multiple literary traditions.
In Contending for the "Chinese Modern", Xiaoping Wang studies the writing of fiction in 1940s China. Through a practice of political hermeneutics of fictional texts and social subtexts, it explores how social modernity and literary modernity intertwined with and interacted upon each other in the development of modern Chinese literature. It not only makes critical reappraisement of some renowned modern Chinese writers, but also sheds fresh lights on a series of theoretical problems pertaining to the issue of plural modernities, in which the problematic of subjectivity, class consciousness and identity politics are the key words as well as the concrete procedures that it employs to undertake the ideological analysis. The manuscript signifies a new paradigm in studies of modern Chinese literature.