Böcker i Cambria Sinophone World Series-serien

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series headed by Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania). Studies of Chinese culture and literature often neglect the importance of the various vocabulary terms for the self and identity that are used somewhat differently from their equivalents in Western languages. In particular, from the Warring States period up to today, Chinese poems often rely on the concept of a soul that can be separated from the body and needs to be summoned back by invocations. This study examines the role of the soul (hun) and the soul-summoning ritual in Chinese literature from ancient times up to the twentieth century. With five case studies from different dynasties, spanning ancient Chu and the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming-Qing transition periods, Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning shows Chinese poets were inspired by the belief in a soul that could be transported away from the body. On one hand, this provided a model for literature, as a therapeutic means of summoning back wayward souls; on the other, it inspired the imaginative range and formal structures of literary works, which followed the soul s journey from the individual person throughout the world and into the heavens. In each period, highlighting the role of soul summoning illuminates new dimensions of literary history that have often been neglected. In the Warring States period, the poem Summons of the Soul is the definitive statement of the theme and has much to tell us about early Chinese conceptions of self, world, and communication. In the Han dynasty, the scholar-poets who established many of the norms and canons of Chinese civilization thereafter were themselves highly susceptible to visions of the soul in flight. Major compositions in the Tang and Song dynasty are structured around soul-summoning in a way that is often ignored. Even as late as the seventeenth century, ancient conceptions of the wandering soul, and the use of poetry to lure it back to wholeness, remained fundamental for literary composition in all genres. Ultimately, the book suggests that the religious dimensions of Chinese poetry have not been sufficiently examined. The conception of the separable soul is a distinctive and perennial theme that has considerable explanatory reach in understanding traditional Chinese culture. Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning will be a valuable addition to students and scholars of Chinese culture, comparative literature, and religious studies.

Modernity, modernization, modernism, and the modern have all been key, interrelated terms in post-traditional China. For all their ubiquity, however, in previous studies of Chinese culture and society there has been insufficient clarity as to what the precise meanings each term has encompassed from the period beginning in 1895, the year of China s catastrophic defeat by Japan. The importance of these terms is underlined by their implication in China s positioning in the world over the course of the past century and a half, as well as the path China will follow in the future. Looking into a set of concepts and practices that have been instrumental in China s road to modernity, namely, the definition of the modern itself, a new notion of literature, linguistic reform, translation, popular culture, and the transformation of the publishing world, Taking China to the World explores the various ways in which activity in the cultural sphere shaped Chinese perceptions of both how its historical course might evolve and how all-compassing change needed to be managed. Most studies of China s modern transformation have implicitly based themselves on the inevitability of a process of cultural, social, and institutional rationalization, more often than not based on Western models, without grappling with the full extent of the struggles to reconcile needed changes with a grand tradition, which, for all the condemnation aimed at it after 1895, still held a powerful appeal for most of those who seriously considered the full extent of the interactions between new and old. That an idea of a monolithic new seemed to take hold of many members of the Chinese elite after the period circa 1920 does not rule out the subtle hold that key portions of the grand tradition have had over modern China. No other book offers this kind of analysis of both the historical origins and contemporary consequences of the agonizing choices made by actors in the cultural sphere who occupied core positions in the life of the Chinese nation. Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity is a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in all subfields of Chinese studies, particularly for those engaged in charting the transformation of Chinese culture and society over the last 150 years and considering what those transformations might hold in store for the future.

Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China is a major new work by one of Europe's most respected senior scholars of Chinese studies, Paolo Santangelo. In it, he questions the common premise that individualism was lacking in premodern China. It is Santangelo's contention that not only was the concept of the individual important in traditional China, but that it existed in interesting ways that are different from modes of individualism in the West. One of the strengths of this study is the masterful manner in which Professor Santangelo treats key terms of his discussion, terms such as xing ("e;human nature ), xin ("e;heart-mind"e;), ji ("e;self"e;), and uses them to analyze various texts. The study deftly weaves together many ideas from history, philosophy, art, and literature, especially the literary dimensions of late imperial history (both classical and vernacular). Another unusual facet of Santangelo's investigations is his thorough familiarity with the the Western intellectual tradition and his expert incorporation of the ideas of thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and the Romantics This inquiry into the moral philosophy and ethics of the self seen in both its public and private dimensions in late imperial China is an important resource for scholars and students in many subfields of Chinese studies, such as history, intellectual history, art history, history of literature, and history of religion.

Theatrical performance occupied a central place in the emotional and political life of the Qing dynasty imperial household. For over two centuries, the Qing court poured a tremendous amount of human and material resources into institutionalizing the theatrical arts for the purposes of entertainment and edification. The emperors and empresses were ardent patrons and key players in establishing an artistic form that the court theatre called its own. They went to great lengths to cultivate a discerning taste in theatre and oversaw the artistic and managerial aspects of court theatrical activities. In the imperial theatrical spaces within and outside the Forbidden City, which were designed and built with the capacity to produce stunning visual effects, theatrical productions were staged to entertain imperial family members and to impress obeisance-paying guests from near and afar. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding the dynamics between the Qing court theatre and the burgeoning popular theatrical traditions outside the court. However, the insights drawn from recent studies have only begun to be applied to the analysis of dramas commissioned by the Qing court for various ceremonial occasions. Treating Qing dynasty court theatre as a unique site in which to examine important but uncharted realms of Chinese theatrical experience, Staging for the Emperors examines two distinct and interlocking dimensions of the Qing court theatre the vicissitudes of the palace troupe and the multifaceted functions of court-commissioned ceremonial dramas to highlight the diverse array of views held by individual rulers as they used theatrical means to promote their personal and political agendas. Drawing on recently discovered materials from a variety of court administrative bureaus, memoirs, diaries, and play scripts written for court ceremonial occasions, this study places the history of Qing court theatre in the broader context of Qing cultural and political history. It demonstrates that theatre, like other forms of courtly art, served the individual rulers desire to embody virtue, to entertain at leisure, and to project aspirations. Staging for the Emperors would appeal to readers interested in China studies and performance studies. It would also appeal to those outside the field of China studies who are interested in developing a crosscultural perspective on the interplay between state rituals, power, identity formation, and theatrical experiences.

The Story of the Stone, also known as Dream of the Red Chamber, is unquestionably the most beloved and most celebrated work of prose fiction in Chinese literary history. For two and half centuries, the novel has inspired a ceaseless flow of critical interpretation ranging from the allegorical, autobiographical, and bibliographical to the poststructural, forming a particular field of study called hongxue ( red studies). Building on the novel s rich content and this vast scholarship, and using Julia Kristeva s terms on intertextuality, especially her notions that every human being is nothing more than an intersection of preexistent discourses created by human language and text, and that reality can only be seized as a reconstructed fiction that exists through its relation to previous fiction, this book presents a new understanding of the novel. Eroticism and Other Literary Conventions in Chinese Literature examines how The Story of the Stone dramatizes human experiences by responding to previous literature, particularly those openly denounced by the novel s internal narrator, the mythic stone. While there has been much discussion about human lives and emotions presented in The Story of the Stone, the mainstream humanist scholarship often reads the text as a reflection of historical figures (e.g., the author of The Story of the Stone) or constructed (but real ) persons. This book, however, argues that while the novel is centrally concerned with defining ren (human), it is equally involved in investigating wen (literature). Thus, the core tenet of The Stone lies in the intricate symbiosis between ren and wen, which gives rise to wenren (literati) and renwen (humanities), and even more to the wen that produces wenti (genre), wenhua (culture), and wenming (civilization) an evolution that had concerned the Chinese literati for centuries but was fictionalized for the first time in The Story of the Stone. How does The Story of the Stone utilize language and text to make meanings of the human lives it creates? How does The Story of the Stone exist through its relation to previous fiction? To answer these questions, this book argues that the mythic stone s harsh critiques of historical romance (yeshi), erotic fiction (fengyue bimo), and scholar-and-beauty fiction (caizi jiaren) cannot be taken at face value. Instead, they signify The Stone s anxiety of influence and allude to the nature of intertextuality. In this light, this book argues that the novel s construction of lust shows its indebtedness to erotic literature; its making of romance is created through the use of drama as reading and as performance; in the protagonist s confrontation with and final submission to social expectations, the novel wrestles with the portrayal of young literati in the scholar-and-beauty convention; and finally, following a genealogy of objects featured in literature to animate human lives, the mythic stone is created to question the convention of storytelling, not only in pre-existing fiction but also in the novel s many previous lives in manuscript versions and printed editions. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in The Story of the Stone, and for readers interested in novel, fiction, drama, and other literary genres and subgenres in Chinese literature.

Zhang Yimou is one of the most famous filmmakers of China, as well as one of the most controversial. Long the object of intense discussion and critique in China, Zhang s approach can express a highly stylized and crafted aesthetics, a documentary, daily-life feel, or a historically rich sense of tragedy and sometimes comedy. The director of some twenty feature films, Zhang also is known for other projects, including work as a cinematographer and actor, and directing the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As a prominent member of the pioneering Fifth Generation of film directors that began working after the Maoist period, Zhang s unique aesthetics garnered global attention. Several of Zhang Yimou s films have won domestic and international awards. Red Sorghum (1987) won the Golden Bear Award, Qiuju Goes to Court (1992) and Not One Less (1999) won the Golden Lion, To Live (1994) won the Grand Prix du Jury, and The Road Home (1999) won the Jury Grand Prix. To Live was banned in China, and Zhang as well as lead actress Gong Li was prevented from making films for two years. The debate that has centered on Zhang s films began right after Red Sorghum came out, and has continued to the present day. Critics branded his work as a self-Orientalizing fantasy that used the trope of a beautiful, vulnerable woman to suggest an inferior position for Chinese culture vis-a-vis the film s Western viewers. In some films notably Red Sorghum and Hero (2002), critics found an endorsement of authoritarian politics. These post-colonial and feminist critiques were countered by those who argued that the films broke through socialist isolation, for the first time finding for Chinese film a global audience. Others argued that the films were more subtle than critics recognized: embedded within them were complex inquiries into power, display, and authority. Despite his stature among Chinese film directors, Zhang Yimou has not yet been the subject of a book-length treatment in English. Film professors who teach his films only have access to a relatively small corpus of articles and book chapters published over some twenty-five years. This book is the first attempt to remedy that situation by laying out not simply a biographical or empirical study, but a polemical argument that counters some of the critical trends in the interpretation of Zhang s films. Taking advantage of the great interest in Zhang s work in China and the long-running debate, Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture uses a wide variety of sources, mainly in Chinese and English, to construct an alternative approach to understanding the films. The study zeroes in on nine feature films and the 2008 Beijing Olympics ceremonies, developing an analysis that both recognizes the formal aesthetic features of the films, while also contextualizing them within the culture debates of contemporary China. Theoretical approaches to the study of film and culture in the West also figure prominently. While finding common themes and structures that bring together several of Zhang s films, the study does not propose a unifying theory of Zhang s work as much as it uncovers connections between the films, showing a sharp, analytical approach at work. In this first critical study of films by Zhang Yimou in English, Wendy Larson plumbs the larger field of debate to suggest thought-provoking ways of thinking about the films and their relationship to Chinese culture. Arguing that the films do not appease Westerners but rather incorporate within themselves an understanding of how culture is changing under globalization, the book interprets the films emphasis on performance under coercion, the duplicity of display, and action under constraint. It investigates themes of gazing and being gazed upon, and behavior under duress, connecting these notions with implications on power, sovereignty, justice, and Chinese modernity. Larson argues that the films do not uncritically promote nationalism as some argue, but rather that they probe the possibilities for and limitations of culture in a globally-situated China. A substantial bibliography that provides references for the overall discussion is included. Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture is an important book for film scholars and for scholars of Chinese culture and history.

Chinese avant-garde fiction undoubtedly represents a summit in contemporary Chinese literature. Given the remarkable achievement of the genre and its revolutionary and profound impact on Chinese literature, it has attracted much attention from the English-speaking academic world. The existent scholarship on this subject, however, has some gaps which need to be filled. There are few book-length studies which provide a concentrated and in-depth analysis of Chinese avant-garde fiction as a literary genre; most studies tend to treat Chinese avant-garde fiction as a component of some grand cultural trends in the contemporary Chinese intellectual world. Such a sweeping historical approach overlooks the aesthetic and epistemological values of the fiction, preventing the researchers from investigating the thematic complexity and diversity and the artistic originality and appeal of the fiction. This book examines the works of three leading writers Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei and their significant contributions to the genre; this is the first in-depth, comparative study on these writers. This book examines how Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei manipulate dark moods and what Karl Jaspers termed limit-situations such as death and suffering, along with other motifs, to pursue both historicity and transcendent truth in their fiction. Setting the fiction against the backdrop of long history of Chinese culture and the development of modern Chinese literature, the book also explores the changing intellectual and literary landscape and the changing paradigms of literature in modern China. This study illuminates the patterns of history presented in the fiction of the three Chinese avant-garde writers as well as their respective views of history. The book also investigates another prominent theme in Chinese avant-garde fiction: the philosophical meditation on the human condition, human nature, and other metaphysical issues. This study also grapples with the mechanisms and devices adopted by these avant-garde writers to defamiliarize the Chineseness of their fiction. In so doing, the book attempts to answer the questions of why and how the reprise of traditional Chinese conventions and themes can be regarded as avant-garde in the Chinese context. The book also sheds light on each writer's aesthetics and the aesthetics of Chinese avant-garde fiction as a genre. Unlike most previous research on Chinese avant-garde fiction, the study focuses on the Chineseness of the fiction or its intertextuality with Chinese conventions and texts. This unique study will be a welcome addition to scholars of Chinese literature and cultural studies.

Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of the most beloved auteur film directors active today. His films are among the most important to have been produced worldwide in the past thirty years. His work has garnered more than a dozen awards, including prizes at The Venice Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Cannes Film Festival. Critics lavish praise on Hou s films, which have won over a dozen major awards worldwide. His breakout film A Time to Live, A Time to Die earned the Fipresci Award at Berlin in 1986 as well as the Special Jury Prize at Torino. Hou won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1989 for A City of Sadness, the first bold public expression of the 1947 February 28th Massacre in Taiwan. His uniquely crafted biopic The Puppetmasterreceived the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1993. He has garnered various additional honors at film festivals in Nantes, Locarno, Rotterdam, Singapore, and elsewhere. Hou s oeuvre has attracted the attention of a wide range of critics, scholars, and film aficionados. His work is technically pioneering, particularly for its signature approach to realism. His subtle interrogation of the aesthetics of Hollywood places him in a category with such greats as Satayajit Ray, Kitano Takeshi, Wong Kar-wai, Abbas Kiarostami, and Werner Herzog. His ability to capture and visualize such elusive phenomena as feelings of malaise, ambivalence and aimlessness in a world in which teleology is the only tolerable cultural logic, his elevation of the insignificant minutiae of daily life to objects of aesthetic sublime, his interrogation of cultural cohesion through the use of multiple languages and symbolic valences compels the serious student of cinema to study his work carefully. Christopher Lupke s book is a comprehensive treatment of Hou Hsiao-hsien s entire oeuvre, including The Assassin. Lupke was able to visit the set of The Assassin and includes rare photos of Hou on his film set. In addition to a detailed filmography and a substantial bibliography, the book also several interviews of Hou Hsiao-hsien that Lupke has translated into English. This book is a must read for all interested in global cinema today. It also provides important information for those interested in the society and politics of postwar Taiwan and Sinophone culture in general. It will appeal to readers concerned with issues such as the representation of ethnicity, gender, political repression, and the tensions between cities and the countryside. Anyone who wishes to understand radical innovation in contemporary world cinema must come to terms with the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Read excerpts from the book Author Interview with Christopher Lupke

In recent years, Sinophone studies has introduced to a broader audience multiple ways of examining Chineseness beyond the traditional China-centered view. Whereas a Sinophone product, whether fiction or film, reflects on the close relationship between language and place, a localist agenda from the margins of China and Chineseness is brought to the fore. It is important to consider that Sinophone literature both embodies an attachment to cultural China and encompasses vital issues of ethnicity and politics with respect to local contexts. To be more precise, Sinophone literature points to constantly evolving changes and adaptations into a profound combination of Chineseness and local identities. Surprisingly, there is no scholarly monograph focusing on the literary production in Sinophone Taiwan so far, even though Taiwan is defined by Shu-mei Shih as a major site of Sinophone literature as a result of its serial and layered colonial condition. What does then Sinophone Taiwan mean? According to Shu-mei Shih, The Sinophone Taiwan, for instance, is only an aspect of Taiwan s multilingual community where aboriginal languages are also spoken, and postmartial law Taiwan cultural discourse is very much about articulating symbolic farewells to China. In other words, Sinophone Taiwan is loaded with an ambivalent attitude towards the Chinese state as well as concept of cultural China while drawing on exclusively localized experiences. This first scholarly monograph focusing on the literary and cultural geography of Taiwan through a Sinophone lens is therefore a step toward filling the gap. While reexamining the cultural and political complexities of Sinophone Taiwan, this book also recognizes the narrative of the strange as a widely adopted artistic form in highlighting Sinophone practices and experiences separated from the China-centric ideology. The study argues that the narratives of the strange in Sinophone Taiwan cross the boundaries between the living and the dead as well as the past and the present, in response to a pastiche of phantasm, Chinese diaspora, gender discourse, and transnational politics. With detailed analysis, this book brings into focus the notion of zhiguai historiography in an attempt to shed light on the Sinophone narratives of the strange and to demonstrate how the topic can help illuminate the social and political implications of literary texts beyond contemporary China. By analyzing the literary tropes of strangeness, this research deals with the critical issues of the cultural exchange between China, Taiwan, and Sinophone Malaysia. The book explores the idea of the strange narrative as a fluid, border-crossing phenomenon that is impossible to ignore in Chinese ethnic writing. In this light, the narrative of the strange refers to the storytelling wedded to the motifs of ghost haunting and/or the figurative manifestation of anomalies. In recounting diverse cultural spectacles of the strange, this book builds on such topics as the ghostly Chineseness, lingering aboriginal spirits, and eccentric identities with respect to ethnic and sexual complexities. Therefore, narratives of the strange are examined from three interrelated perspectives in this book. First, spectral and monstrous appearances can be associated either with a nostalgic attachment to the past or with an emotional resistance against historical traumas. Second, the scope of the strange can be expanded to bring into play the figuration of the ghostly/monstrous together with the magical representation of uncanniness, wonder, and fantasy. Third, strange figures can be posited as the invisible, marginalized subjects like sexual and ethnic minorities within a dominant social framework. Intriguingly, the equation can also be inverted by creative writers to make strange figures voiced and visible in a political light. Collectively, the scope of the strange includes the hauntology, the ghostly, the monstrous, the uncanny, the magical, and the fantastic. Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond will be of interest to scholars and students in Asian studies, particularly Sinophone studies as well as Chinese literature and culture.

Chinese poetry, along with many other art forms in China, underwent a highly self-conscious transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Poetry, perhaps more than any other art form, did so under the heavy burden of a voluminous literary precedent, a precedent which was in its very format of patterned words inscribed on scrolls a mark of the Chinese literati tradition. Turning away from this tradition seemed necessary in the context of a political, social, and cultural reform movement (which was designed to strengthen China in the face of increasing international pressure as well as domestic breakdown). At the same time, reforming a poetic tradition which had served as a principal touchstone of aesthetic accomplishment from its role in Confucian canon as object of contemplation for correct action, to its function as a test of candidate's qualifications to govern through the civil service examination, to its function as national past-time in all manner of social gathering was a major challenge. The result of such a predicament for poets throughout the twentieth century has been the compulsion to discover a poetic style which resonates with the modern world and yet is rooted in Chinese cultural experience. One way in which poets have been able to accomplish this is by relying on poetry's visuality, be it in the graphic properties of the writing system itself, the visual context of the presentation of the poetic texts, or the acute image details in the poems. The history of approximately one century of modern Chinese poetry production has been addressed broadly in scholarship, but such broad strokes tend to miss important dynamics which fall outside of general narratives. The importance of Chinese visual tradition to modern Chinese poets is a good case in point. Accordingly, this book addresses specific manifestations of the nexus connecting modernity and visuality in Chinese poetry. It begins with a discussion of May Fourth poetics as exemplified in the groundbreaking work of Li Jinfa, China's first "e;Symbolist"e; poet. From there the book traces notable developments of visuality in the new form or free verse writing (called Xinshi or "e;New Poetry"e;) through mid-century modernist experiments in Taiwan (focusing on Ji Xian). From there the book then explores the avant-garde poetry of Luo Qing and Xia Yu before returning to mainland Chinese developments of Misty poets Yan Li and his contemporaries. The work concludes with a wide variety of poet-artists writing and exhibiting in the twenty-first century. Looking across this period of modern Chinese poetry's development, one is able to observe how important the visual-verbal dynamic has been to the innovation of poetic style and method. From the twenty-first century on, such multi-media expressions will likely continue to grow; this is a function of a Chinese aesthetic tradition pairing word and image and will continue to manifest in new and more inventive ways. This is an important book for Asian literary and art history studies and history collections.

Conversant in critical and creative modes of thought, this book examines the uses of translation in Asian and Anglophone literatures to bridge discontinuous subjectivities in Eurasian transnational identities and translingual hybridizations of literary Modernism. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations focuses on the roles of mysticism and language in Dict e's poetic deconstruction of empire, engaging metaphysical issues salient in the history of translation studies to describe how Theresa Cha and four other authors Sui Sin Far, Chuang Hua, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf used figurative and actual translations to bridge discontinuous subjectivities. The author Karen Lee s explorations of linguistic politics and poetics in this eclectic group of writers concentrates on the play of innovative language deployed to negotiate divided or multiple consciousness. Over the past decade, emerging scholarship on transnationalism and writers of Asian heritage has focused primarily on diasporic Asian literary production on American soil. For instance, Rachel Lee s seminal publication, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), examines how Asian American feminist literary criticism is shaped by global-local influences in the United States. Additionally, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (2006), edited by Shirley Lim, et al., explores the transnational aspects of Asian literature in America, analyzing a discursive globalized imaginary as American writers Asian of heritage move within and across national boundaries. Following Lim s anthology, Lan Dong s Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine (2010) concerns the representations of women transposed from Asian oral traditions of women warriors to the United States. However, less scholarship on the Anglophone literatures of Asia and the Americas has focused on Asian writers within broader comparative frameworks of global perspectives outside Asian American literature and in comparison to Asian British literature, or aside from the parameters of specific Asia-to-America tropes such as the aforementioned woman warrior, as in Sheng-mei Ma s Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998), or Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa s Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). Uniquely situated among these discussions, Lee s book extends current lines of inquiry by including the oeuvres of diasporic Asian writers in Asia, America, and abroad, presenting their works within the contexts of transnationalism via the dual lenses of translation and translingual migration. As new scholarship, this book foregrounds literary transnationalism and translingual migrations in a context of East to West as a study of representative Anglophone literatures in the Asian diaspora. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations is highly relevant to university teaching audiences in postcolonial literature, Asian American studies, Anglophone writers of the Asian diaspora, cultural feminism, Eurasian studies, and translation studies.

Metalworking in Bronze Age China is the first study that adopts a comprehensive, thorough, and interdisciplinary approach toward early Chinese lost-wax castings. It shows that the dominant belief that the lost-wax process as the optimal method for casting bronzes deserves more rigorous examination. In a broader sense, the book provides a study on the norms, which are seldom questioned. By examining the reasons why Chinese founders often chose not to use the lost-wax process they had clearly mastered, the book refutes the idea that lost-wax technology is the only right way to cast bronzes. This study demonstrates that a norm is in many ways an illusion that twists our comprehension of art, technology, civilization, and history.

Wen Yuan-ning (1900 1984) was both an insider and an outsider on the politics of celebrity in modern China. Born into a Hakka family in the Dutch East Indies, he studied law at Cambridge University before moving to China to embark on a remarkably varied career. He taught English literature at China s top universities, including Peking and Tsinghua, contributed to leading English-language periodicals such as The China Critic and T ien Hsia Monthly, served in China s legislature in Nanking, worked as a wartime propagandist in Hong Kong, and eventually was appointed as China s ambassador to Greece. During the heady days of Anglophone publishing in 1930s China, Wen Yuan-ning edited for The China Critic a series of Unedited Biographies (later Intimate Portraits ) of famous contemporary Chinese personages. Wen and his collaborators some of whom wrote anonymously offered readers mischievous and idiosyncratic accounts of the careers and personalities of the people in the news. These celebrity sketches proved both controversial and popular, with several of them immediately being translated into Chinese. A selection of seventeen of Wen s own contributions to The China Critic series was published to acclaim in 1935 as the book Imperfect Understanding. Yet Wen and his contributions to Chinese literary culture disappeared from the historical record after the founding of the People s Republic, likely because Wen wrote in English and had close ties to the Chinese Nationalist Party. What did it mean to be a celebrity in 1930s China? Who were Republican China s preeminent intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians, diplomats, and businesspeople, and how were they represented in the popular press? This anthology brings together fifty rediscovered essays, written in English in 1934, which offer fascinating, close-up profiles of a constellation of celebrities. From the warlord Han Fuju to the Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang to the intellectual leader Hu Shi to the novelist Lao She to ambassador Wellington Koo to the Singaporean Chinese entrepreneur Lim Boon Keng to the deposed Qing Emperor Puyi, the series presents a panorama of Chinese elites. Imperfect Understanding constitutes a significant archival discovery, a unique artifact of the pre-war heyday of Anglophone literary culture in China. Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Chinese Celebrities is both an entertaining work of literature, by turns comedic and touching, and an important historical document. Its sketches represent influential Chinese historical figures, warts and all, in the eyes of contemporary observers seeking to provide readers an alternative to the autobiographical puffery of popular books like Who s Who in China. Christopher Rea s introduction offers new research on the forgotten literary figure Wen Yuan-ning and argues that one of the essays published under his name was written anonymously by a young man who went on to become one of modern China s literary giants: Qian Zhongshu. This edition of Imperfect Understanding also includes multiple reviews of Wen s book, brief biographies of the subjects of the Critic series, and a bibliography of further writings by and on Wen Yuan-ning.

When Gao Xingjian was proclaimed Nobel Laureate of Literature in 2000, it drew attention to his significant body of literary works that included a collection of short stories, titled Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather (1989), two autobiographical novels titled Soul Mountain (1990) and One Man s Bible (1999), as well as seventeen plays, three of which when performed in Beijing in the early 1980s, had turned him into an instant celebrity, not just in China, but internationally. His plays Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983), and Wild Man (1986) were well known in the English- speaking world soon after their publication in Chinese. However, when his next play, The Other Shore (1986), was banned after a few rehearsals, he relocated to Paris in 1987. His play Escape (1990) about the 4 June 1989 military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, resulted in a virtual ban on his writings, which could no longer be published, sold, or performed in the People s Republic of China. This meant that both the author and his works had been airbrushed out of existence, and that Gao Xingjian research would find it impossible to take root in China. Gifted with extraordinary artistic sensibilities and boundless curiosity, Gao was born in Republican China in 1940 into a cosmopolitan family environment and established precocious reading habits from an early age. His formal education began after the establishment of the People s Republic of China in 1949, and he subsequently enrolled in a five-year French course at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing (1957 1962), where he read widely on modern and contemporary French authors, European writings in French translation, and also in premodern Chinese writings. Such writings were all banned beyond the walls of the Institute library, and Gao s prolific reading would inform what he began to write in secret for his personal enjoyment, because what he wrote clearly failed to conform with the national guidelines for cultural production. Mao Zedong s experiment in social engineering during the Cultural Revolution (1966 1976) meant the negation of the individual and the extolling of mass ideology. Gao survived by writing in secret to remind himself that he had a conscious thinking self. Years later he distinguished himself in China and the rest of the world for his innovative fiction, plays, theatre, and Chinese ink paintings. Since Gao Xingjian s Nobel win in 2000 he has demonstrated his profound erudition across cultures in his creative explorations in literature and the visual arts. His intense intellectual curiosity can seldom be matched by his contemporaries, and his creative achievements in literature, the dramatic arts, painting, and film have been extraordinary, and have been reflected in his aesthetic treatises on art and literature. English-language publications have been in the forefront of Gao Xingjian research since the 1980s, and this book fills a Gao Xingjian research hiatus simply because it is hard to keep abreast of his stridently innovative creations. This volume brings readers up to date on Gao Xingjian, who is probably in this age of uncertainties, one of the foremost aesthetes in literature and the visual arts. Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics demonstrates the extensive reach of Gao Xingjian s transcultural, transdisciplinary and transmedia explorations. Showcased here is the panoramic aesthetics of a polymath who has successfully personified modern-time renaissance by projecting the struggles of the individual s inner landscape into vivid images on stage, film, black-and-white paintings, and in the multilayered narrative expressions of fiction and poetry, even dance and music, to evoke a sense of sincerity and authenticity that penetrates a viewer/reader s heart. The volume is divided into four parts: philosophical inquiry; transdiscipline, transgenre, transculture; cine-poems with paintings, dance and music; and identifying and defining the self. The chapters probe different aspects of Gao Xingjian s work, bearing testimony to their diverse specializations. This book will appeal to Chinese literature scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with an interest in the broad subjects of contemporary Chinese literature, high arts, avant-garde culture, women s and gender studies, Sinophone film and transmedia culture, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

Lu Xun, a founder of modern Chinese literature, lived through a pivotal moment in Chinese history. Schooled in the old order, he matured during its symbolic collapse the end of the dynastic system and lived through the wrenching transition into a new order that had not yet come into view. The Chinese state, weakened by massive internal rebellions, faced unprecedented military, commercial, and diplomatic pressure from Western powers. Devastating challenges in the material realm brought into question fundamental premises of Chinese identity. Why was China so weak and what could be done about it? Initially inclined to look to the material realm for solutions, Lu Xun early rejected a medical career and staked his future on a conviction that literature offered a promising arena from which to convert minds and hearts to new ways of perceiving, ways that were better adapted to the current crisis. Yet when prompted to write short stories that might forward that agenda, he wrote the stories of Call to Arms and Wandering, which instead gave symbolic expression to the ambiguities and complexities that he experienced within himself. Although he came to doubt the power of literature to contribute to the urgent need for cultural transformation, the stories from these collections comprise an essential part of his legacy. His deep concern about human suffering and his commitment to truth-telling are underlying pre-occupations that run throughout his evolving understanding of this moment in China s history. Lu Xun attributed his motivation for a career in literature to his desire to cure the spirits of the Chinese people. Given Lu Xun s explicit ambition to address China s historical crisis, scholars have addressed in great depth his contributions to Chinese intellectual and literary history and probed his short stories as expressions of his ambition to help solve China s crisis. He has been perceived as both an agent of change and an embodiment of his time. Yet generally scholars have not queried the psychological dimensions of his self-appointed task. If he imagined that curing spirits might even be possible, it would seem that he might have had at least an implicit psychological model of the disease, its causes, a process for healing it, and a vision of the cured state. Did he? Scholars who study Lu Xun s modern short stories have usually focused on the content and used the stories to understand Lu Xun the writer or to sheds light on his times; they have attended to the structure only to the degree that it illuminates these concerns. This study executes a reversal, decentering the content and focusing on the structure as a primary means to understand the texts, and it seeks to understand the Lu Xun who presents himself through his work, not Lu Xun the full human being. The structure that emerges from a close reading of the stories does indeed present an implicit therapeutic model. Carl Jung s theories of the normative human self articulate with some precision Lu Xun s implicit vision of spiritual cure. Jung, one of three key founders of modern Western psychology, grounded his understanding of the human psyche in personal self-scrutiny and extensive clinical practice, and so his theories offer a validated psychological model for interpreting the textual evidence. Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung thus deploys a new methodology and proposes a new model for interpreting Lu Xun s two collections of modern short stories. The study demonstrates that in fact Lu Xun had a clear but implicit model of spiritual healing and cure. He began with the assumption that this psycho-dynamic paradigm might apply in all arenas of Chinese life and so tested out this premise imaginatively through his stories. The conclusion embedded in his fiction is that in the domains of nation and community, healing would not be possible without revolutionary change, but that healing was possible, although hardly likely, within the confines of family and the self. Viewing the stories of Call to Arms and Wandering through this lens often yields important new insights about individual stories. Even when it does not, the approach draws attention to the commonalities disguised by the great variety of plots, characters, and narrative strategies. Further, this approach incorporates and generalizes the more limited way of viewing the stories in terms of class analysis, and it complements the historical and biographical discussion of these works. Perhaps more important is that understanding Lu Xun s psychological model opens new ways of imagining the relevance of his stories to timeless human concerns. Contemporary scholars increasingly ask about Lu Xun s value now that the overt subjects of his concerns have receded into the past, and they have also looked to understand his role in the context of the international intellectual currents of his time. Although not primarily concerned with the sources of Lu Xun s creativity, this study does suggest resonances between the structure of his thought as revealed in the stories and that of key nineteenth-century European philosophers and writers. Even while being firmly grounded in his own times, Lu Xun evoked universal themes and archetypes of the human condition. This book will appeal to scholars in Asian studies, comparative literature, and psychology.

This book explores a new and innovative topic the relationship between geographical advancements in the Mid-Tang period (790s to 820s) and spatial imaginaries in contemporaneous literature. Historically and politically, the Mid-Tang period is generally considered to be a period of imperial reconstruction following the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion (755 763), a rebellion that had a profound impact not only on the Tang empire but also on all of Chinese history. On the one hand, this era witnessed a heightened geographical awareness and a rapid development and accumulation of geographical knowledge, as was manifested in the governmental production of local map-guides and the invention of some monumental world maps. On the other hand, Mid-Tang literature represents one of the peaks of traditional Chinese literature and is known for its diversity of genres and innovative and imaginative engagement with space. For the first time in Tang scholarship, this study identifies the epistemological and aesthetic interplay between geography and literature in medieval China and investigates how this thus-far neglected interplay shaped the Mid-Tang literary imagination. This interdisciplinary investigation uncovers a rich cultural history of human exploration of the world on both fronts and provides a fresh reading of some of the most famous works of Tang literature, for example Li He s poetry and Liu Zongyuan s landscape essays. This study reveals some unique phenomena in genre development and individual creation in Mid-Tang literature and deepens our understanding of the inner workings and internal drive of traditional Chinese literature in general. This book expands and deepens the exploration of the interactions between literature and geography. Literary geography has been an active interdisciplinary field ever since the 1970s. In the early years as the field was taking shape, it was widely criticized for its instrumentalization of literary texts as unproblematic sources for empirical geographical study. In recent years, however, literary scholars have become increasingly interested in treating literary texts as another form of geography, or spatial organization, as many key literary elements, such as setting and milieu in fiction and imagery arrangement in poetry, involve spatial understanding on a fundamental level. This study takes two important approaches regarding the ongoing debates in the field of literary geography. Inasmuch as traditional Chinese intellectual culture prioritized broad learning over specialization, disciplinary boundaries were unclear and literati were often multitalented. Accordingly, in the cases examined in this book, these literary masters were also cartographers, geographical writers, or at least experienced readers of geographical works. Therefore, the study s approach does not treat either literature or geography as instrumental to the other, but rather examines how these two interrelated fields formed a shared intellectual horizon among the literati and found entrance to each other to create new knowledge, perspectives, and metaphors. This study also does not regard literature as a metaphorical geography in a generalized sense, but is specifically focused on how the geographic proficiency of literary authors informed their literature. Together, these two approaches suggest new possibilities of interdisciplinary exchange and offer a new perspective on the results of such exchanges as embodied in literary creation. This book will be a welcome resource for scholars and students in Chinese literature, historical geography, cultural history, and art history.

By charting a history in which sensualist poetry reached unprecedented and unsurpassed heights through late Ming poets, experienced a period of hibernation during most of the Qing, and then reemerged to awaken the senses of late Qing and early Republican readers, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China brings to light an important Chinese literary tradition and underscores intellectual trends that have been neglected, marginalized, misunderstood, and even condemned. Uncovering an important but neglected part of history during which the freelance intelligentsia, who emerged in late imperial and early Republican China, countered the political mainstream by drawing on a long yet marginalized tradition of sensual lyricism, this book offers the first history of how fragrant and bedazzling (xiangyan) became a guiding aesthetic of countercultural movements from the late Ming to the early Republican era roughly, from the late sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Sensualist poets and other writers of these eras extolled amorous desire and romantic love. Through erotic poetry, they rebelled against not only orthodox Neo-Confucianism but also the radical cultural reform agenda of the late Qing and the New Culture Movement of the Republic. In eras that emphasized sociopolitical functions of literature, they promoted classical lyricism and the satisfaction of individual expressive needs. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book argues that sensual lyricism is more political than its sensuous surfaces and that China s lyrical tradition is sexier and more modern than existing histories have led us to believe. This study demonstrates that dominant political ideologies and cultural practices of early modern China always faced counteractions in the form of a discourse of sensuality, femininity, and romance. The book examines myriad primary sources, such as the monumental anthologies of sensual poetry compiled in both the late Ming and the late Qing periods, which are brought to critical attention for the first time. Bridging literary and intellectual history, the study surveys three hundred years of poetry and essays, from individual collections to voluminous anthologies, and from traditional books to modern magazines. The first half of the book focuses on materials produced during the Ming, and the second half examines publications of the turn of the twentieth century. In her examination of these sources, Xiaorong Li shows that the poetics of sensuality was political on personal and historical levels during and beyond the late imperial period. Sensuality and decadence, Li argues, were forces of literary modernization, as well as an important continuity between the eras often referred to as premodern and modern. Li also relates Chinese sensual literature to decadent movements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. In both contexts, while perceived as a reflection of moral decay, decadent literature posed challenges to social and cultural norms by representing the repressed individual body and its cultural expressions. This comparative perspective brings us toward a better understanding of sensualism as a part of modernity.

The book is a study of the works of the Northern Song Chinese poet Chen Yuyi (1090 1139) as he fled the invading Jurchen soldiers in the political throes of a dynastic transition. Author Yugen Wang demonstrates how Chen s poems epitomize the new style of writing in the Song that is markedly different from that of his Tang predecessors. Underscoring this stylistic and aesthetic analysis is a comparison of Chen and his model, the Tang master Du Fu (712 770). Wang concludes that although the traumatic experience triggered Chen s inner Du Fu, he and Du were writing from different literary and cultural assumptions, with different expectations and skill sets. The collective eleventh-century pursuit of ideological and intellectual cohesion requires that Chen write more cogently than Du Fu; the urgent contingencies of his travel mandate that he observe and make sense of the political chaos from the perspective of a realistic road traveler. The result is a compact, practical, logically coherent, and technically precise style with ramifications that go far beyond Chen s own times. This is the first book-length study of Chen s poetry in English. Through detailed analysis of Chen s poems, and of the political and psychological conditions under which they were written, the reader gains intimate insights into not only how a classical Chinese poet conducted his business, on the road, in crisis, but also the sources of the poet s inner strength, what culturally, psychologically, and emotionally sustained him on the long dreadful journey. This was an important moment for Chen Yuyi and for Chinese literary history. Chen s poems bring to focus the changing dynamics of the classical Chinese poet s relationship to the world. As his journey grew longer and brought him farther away from central China, the richness of the local landscapes in the south made him less apprehensive about the political situation, allowed him to endure the constant fluctuations in his environment, and revitalized his inner self as a poet. As Chen struggled and reconciled with the political situation, he achieved a new balance between person and world, mind and landscape, a status later Chinese critics and theorists call qingjing jiaorong, the propitious fusion and coming together of emotion and nature in poetry. Writing Poetry, Surviving War: The Works of Refugee Scholar-Official Chen Yuyi (1090 1139) is an original study on Chinese poetry and an important book for Asian studies and premodern Chinese humanities collections. It targets both the scholarly and the general audience whose interests intersect China, premodern travel, trauma literature, traditional ideas of nature, and landscape poetry.

In the past four hundred years, the cultural position of Taiwan has been undergoing a series of drastic changes due to constant political turmoil. From the early seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, the ruling power of Taiwan shifted from Spaniard and Dutch to the Late-Ming Zheng regime, then to the Qing court and imperial Japan, and finally to the Kuomintang (KMT) government from China. In this regard, Taiwan has long been regarded as a supplementary addition to its cultural Other: China, Japan, or imperial western powers, despite its rich Aboriginal cultures. To create a self-claimed subjectivity, the localist camp of the island has been promoting the Taiwanese consciousness via political movements and literary writings in a century-long campaign. Its focus on the native soil and experience is well connected with the Sinophone studies, which has been a prominent field across geographical and disciplinary barriers. As Taiwan's community grows more diverse, Taiwan literature is enriched by a series of locally based writings that draw attention to a specific space and/or to the division between places. In the twentieth century, more and more Taiwanese writers are no longer content with a singular place or dual comparison in their literary creations. Rather, they have started to recognize the plurality of Taiwaneseness and thus re-create an ambiguous form of the Taiwanese subjectivity in response to the conflict and compromise between political beliefs and ethnic groups in a cross-cultural light. To further engage with the multifaceted cultural expressions of Taiwan, this book speaks to the current framework of Sinophone studies by focusing on modern Taiwan and its entanglement with cultural China, Chinese diasporas, nativist trend, and Aboriginal consciousness. Recognizing the unresolved ethnic issues of Taiwan, this study explores different dimensions of ethnoscape in response to the cross-cultural landscape of Taiwan and beyond, while at the same time taking into account the intertwining of the official history and the individual, or ethnic, memory of Taiwan.

This book examines the interconnection between the idea of monstrosity and the emergence of Chinese cultural identity since the Song dynasty. Using four case studies on the developmental history of the fox demon, Zhang Fei, Sun Wukong, and Zhong Kui in vernacular literature, it explores how monstrosity, through its traditional connection to foreignness, played a crucial role in shaping society s idea regarding the self/other dichotomy. Chinese vernacular literature matured during the Southern Song period and coincided with society s growing apprehension of foreignness. As society s perception of the other fluctuated between acceptance and abhorrence following the Mongolian conquest of the Middle Kingdom and the subsequent political desire to return to a fixation with the concept of Han during the Ming dynasty, the idea of monstrosity was adopted by these works as a logical vessel for contemplating the question of identity. Unlike other forms of written work in China, vernacular literature developed out of the necessity to cater to the mass. As such, they provide a unique window to understand society s reaction to the cultural and political milieu of the time. By resituating the production of these works within this cultural backdrop, the importance of this study lies both in the foregrounding of the manifestation of Chinese cultural identity in the literary and the proposition of its importance to our understanding of the cultural politics since the Song dynasty. Although academics have long been aware of the importance of the cultural milieu of the Song-Yuan-Ming period to the development of Chinese cultural identity, there remains a lack of attention to the evolution of this identity during this time. The aim of this book is to explore the way cultural identity is encapsulated by the idea of monstrosity and how vernacular literature offers a window into society s continuous attempt to redefine this concept, in response to a shifting political landscape. But beyond its timely discussion of the background and historical genealogy of how Chineseness is conceptualized, this book specifically addresses the effect of the contentiousness of ethnicity on the identity question. In doing so, it explores how this gradual historical transformation of Chinese cultural identity is closely tied to xenophobia and the reimagination of foreignness as reflected in the idea of monstrosity. Students and scholars of Late Imperial Chinese literature are likely to find this book refreshing and informative. However, its overall thrust of the development of Chinese cultural identity should also appeal to readers who are interested in Early Modern Chinese history, especially those fascinated by questions concerning the formation of Chinese cultural identity.

It is now forty years after Mao Zedong s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, and more than fifty years since the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine. During this time, the collective memory of these events has been sanitized, reduced to a much-diluted version of what truly took place. Historical and sociological approaches cannot fully address the moral failure that allowed the atrocities of the Mao era to take place. Humanist approaches, such as literary criticism, have a central role to play in uncovering and making explicit the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators in memory writing in order to recover the truth of China s history. In this unprecedented study The Great Leap Backward, inspired by Holocaust studies, memory work such as fiction, memoirs, autobiographies, and documentary films that have surfaced since Mao's death are examined to uncover the many aspects of the forces underlying remembering and forgetting. These are significant for they also embody the politics of writing and publishing traumatic historical memories in contemporary China and beyond. Beginning with a scar literature classic and ending with popular Cultural Revolution memoirs that appeared early in the twenty-first century, this study provides us with another important way through which memory studies can help us grapple with traumatic histories.

This book probes many crucial controversies: What are Taiwan's meaningful cultural and historical connections to Japan? How do Taiwanese filmmakers and audiences feel about mainland China? How does Taiwan cinema deal with environmental issues, animal rights, human trafficking, sexuality, and the challenges facing ethnic minorities?