Böcker i Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series-serien

Tang poetic culture was based on hand-copied manuscripts and oral performance. This study aims to engage the textual realities of medieval literature by shedding light on the material lives of poems during the Tang, from their initial oral or written instantiation through their often lengthy and twisted paths of circulation.

In the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, Sarah Schneewind places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. This legitimate, institutionalized political voice for commoners expands a scholarly understanding of "public opinion" in late imperial China, and illuminates Ming thought and politics.

"Song Lyric," ci, is one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry, radically distinct from "Classical Poetry," shi. Stephen Owen examines song lyric's literary traditions, including its origins, major writers and collections, and development into a genre, while offering a new hypothesis on the relationship between song practice and written text.

Ya Zuo places Shen Gua (1031 1095) on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology. Her study provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of diversity in Chinese thinking.

Suyoung Son examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial transactions in textual production and circulation.

Early medieval writers in China understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Wendy Swartz explores how these writers developed a distinctive mosaic of ways to participate in their cultural heritage by weaving textual strands from a shared and expanding store of literary resources into new patterns and configurations.

The Qing Empire in the early nineteenth century faced bureaucratic corruption, food shortages, infrastructure decay, domestic rebellion, adverse balances of trade, and a previously inconceivable foreign threat from the West. William T. Rowe uses literati reformer Bao Shichen as a prism to understand contemporary response to this general crisis.

Li Mengyang (1473-1530) was a scholar-official who initiated the literary archaist movement that sought to restore ancient styles of prose and poetry in sixteenth-century China. Chang Woei Ong situates Li's quest to redefine literati learning as a way to build a perfect social order in the context of intellectual transitions since the Song dynasty.

Rebecca Doran offers a new understanding of major female figures of the Tang era-including Wu Zhao, Empress Wei, and Shangguan Wan'er-within their literary-historical contexts, and delves into critical questions about the relationship between Chinese historiography, reception-history, and the process of image-making and cultural construction.

Ellen Widmer examines the writings of a literary family whose works embodied shifting attitudes toward women in late Qing China. She illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the preceding period, the synchronic interplay of genres during the family's lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with other regions.

In Northern Song China, reform-minded statesmen sought to remove the tension between the Confucian Classics and statist ideals of "big government." Jaeyoon Song illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage of classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.

The third century CE-the Jian'an era or Three Kingdoms-holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and events also inspired works of art throughout Chinese history. Xiaofei Tian examines the interface of these two nostalgias.

Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao outlines the evolution of musical performance in early China, first within and then ultimately away from the socio-religious context of ancestor worship. The focus of this study is on excavated texts; it is the first to use both bronze and bamboo narratives to show the evolution of a single ritual practice.

Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious, social, and art historians, this book seeks to recover the motivations behind the creation of religious art, including temple buildings, sculpture, and wall paintings.

As descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) and his son Teika (1162-1244), the heirs of the Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage spanning over eight centuries. Carter combines family history, literary criticism, and historical research in a coherent narrative tracking the evolution of the Reizei Way.

The vision of poetic competence evolved for over a millennium from calculated performances of inherited words to sincere passionate outbursts to displays of verbal wit combining calculation with the appearance of spontaneity. This book tells the story of the development of poetic competence to uncover the complexity of the concept.

Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, Steven B. Miles describes the circulation of people through one of the world's great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

Bannermen Tales is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive study of zidishu-a popular storytelling genre created by the Manchus in early eighteenth-century Beijing. With original translations, musical score, and numerous illustrations of hand-copied and printed texts, this study opens a new window into Qing literature.

Scholars have described the eighteenth century in China as a time of "state activism" and often associate the Taiping Rebellion and postbellum restoration efforts with the origins of elite activism. Seunghyun Han, however, argues that the ascendance of elite activism can be traced to the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns in the early nineteenth century.

Unlike traditional Japanese literature, with its rich tradition of comedy, modern Japanese literature is commonly associated with high seriousness. Cohn analyzes works by three writers-Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993), Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), and Inoue Hisashi (1934- )-that assault the notion that comedy cannot be part of serious literature.

Sarah M. Allen explores the tale literature of eighth- and ninth-century China to show how written tales of the Tang canon we know today grew out of a fluid culture of hearsay in elite society. The book focuses on two main types of tales, those based in gossip about recognizable public figures and those developed out of lore concerning the occult.

After the 1911 fall of the Qing dynasty, many declared the classical Chinese poetic tradition dead. In Modern Archaics, Shengqing Wu draws on extensive archival research into the poetry collections and literary journals of two generations of writers to challenge this claim and demonstrate the continuing significance of the classical form.

The realignment of the social order that occurred over the course of the Sung dynasty set the pattern for Chinese society over most of the later imperial era. Bossler examines that realignment from the perspective of specific families, using data on Sung elites-grand councilors who led the bureaucracy and locally prominent gentlemen in Wu-chou.

Wai-yee Li examines the discursive space of women in seventeenth-century China. Using texts written by women or by men writing in a feminine voice, as well as writings that turn women into signifiers of lamentation or nostalgia, Li probes the emotional and psychological turmoil of the Ming-Qing transition and subsequent moments of national trauma.

Lurid depictions of sex and impotence, themes of emperor worship and violence, the use of realism and myth-these characterize the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Napier discovers surprising similarities as well as provocative dissimilarities in the work of two writers of radically different political orientations.

This volume analyzes the representation of gender and desire in elite, male-authored literary texts in China dating from roughly 200 B.C. until 1000 A.D.

The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China's literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing.

The 18th-century Chinese novel Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars), Wu Jingzi's (1701-54) ironic portrait of literati life, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism.

In medieval Japanese literature, the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism began to be incorporated into the teaching of waka poetry. The main figure in this development was 13th-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, whose commentaries transformed secular texts into allegories of Buddhist enlightenment.

This book, the most detailed and comprehensive study of pao-chuan in any language, studies 34 early examples in order to understand the origins and development of this textual tradition. Although it focuses on content and structure, it also treats the social context of these works, as well as their transmission and ritual use.