Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere
Title | Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere PDF eBook |
Author | Xiaoshan Yang |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 325 |
Release | 2020-05-11 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1684173876 |
"The Chinese garden has been explored from a variety of angles. Much has been written about its structural features as well as its cosmological, religious, philosophical, moral, aesthetic, and economic underpinnings. This book deals with the poetic configurations of the private garden in cities from the ninth to the eleventh century in relation to the development of the private sphere in Chinese literati culture. It focuses on the ways in which the new values and rhetoric associated with gardens and the objects found in them helped shape the processes of self-cultivation and self-imaging among the literati, as they searched for alternatives to conventional values at a time when traditional political, moral, and aesthetic norms were increasingly judged inapplicable or inadequate. The garden was also an artifact and a locus for material culture and social competition. Focusing on a series of anecdotes about private transactions involving objects in gardens, the author dissects the intricate nexus between the exchange of poetry and the poetry of exchange. In tracing the development of the private urban garden through the writings of Bai Juyi, Su Shi, Sima Guang, and their contemporaries, the author argues that this private space figured increasingly as a place of disengagement for those out of political power and hence was increasingly invaded by political forces."
Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere
Title | Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere PDF eBook |
Author | Xiaoshan Yang |
Publisher | Harvard Univ Asia Center |
Pages | 334 |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | Chinese poetry |
ISBN | 9780674012196 |
This book deals with the poetic configurations of the private garden in cities from the ninth to the eleventh century in relation to the development of the private sphere in Chinese literati culture.
Japan’s Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930
Title | Japan’s Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930 PDF eBook |
Author | William Puck Brecher |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 384 |
Release | 2021-03-29 |
Genre | Psychology |
ISBN | 9004450157 |
Japan's Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930 explores the genesis and historical development of autonomy and its evolving relationship with public authority in early modern and modern Japan.
All Mine!
Title | All Mine! PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen Owen |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 120 |
Release | 2021-12-14 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0231554877 |
Under the Song Dynasty, China experienced rapid commercial growth and monetization of the economy. In the same period, the austere ethical turn that led to neo-Confucianism was becoming increasingly prevalent in the imperial bureaucracy and literati culture. Tracing the influences of these trends in Chinese intellectual history, All Mine! explores the varied ways in which eleventh-century writers worked through the conflicting values of this new world. Stephen Owen contends that in the new money economy of the Song, writers became preoccupied with the question of whether material things can bring happiness. Key thinkers returned to this problem, weighing the conflicting influences of worldly possessions and material comfort against Confucian ideology, which locates true contentment in the Way and disdains attachment to things. In a series of essays, Owen examines the works of writers such as the prose master Ouyang Xiu, who asked whether tranquility could be found in the backwater to which he had been exiled; the poet and essayist Su Dongpo, who was put on trial for slandering the emperor; and the historian Sima Guang, whose private garden elicited reflections on private ownership. Through strikingly original readings of major eleventh-century figures, All Mine! inquires not only into the material conditions of happiness but also the broader conditions of knowledge.
Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950
Title | Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950 PDF eBook |
Author | Gail Bernstein |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 425 |
Release | 2020-03-17 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1684174023 |
The eleven chapters in this volume explore the process of carving out, in discourse and in practice, the boundaries delineating the state, the civil sphere, and the family in Japan from 1600 to 1950. One of the central themes in the volume is the demarcation of relations between the central political authorities and local communities. The early modern period in Japan is marked by a growing sense of a unified national society, with a long, common history, that existed in a coherent space. The growth of this national community inevitably raised questions about relationships between the imperial government and local groups and interests at the prefectural and village levels. Moves to demarcate divisions between central and local rule in the course of constructing a modern nation contributed to a public discourse that drew on longstanding assumptions about political legitimacy, authority, and responsibility as well as on Western political ideas.
One Who Knows Me
Title | One Who Knows Me PDF eBook |
Author | Anna Shields |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 376 |
Release | 2020-10-26 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 168417080X |
The friendships of writers of the mid-Tang era (780s–820s)—between literary giants like Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi—became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. What inspired mid-Tang literati to write about their friendships with such zeal? And how did these writings influence Tang literary culture more broadly? In One Who Knows Me, the first book to delve into friendship in medieval China, Anna M. Shields explores the literature of the mid-Tang to reveal the complex value its writers discovered in friendship—as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding. Shields traces the evolution of the performance of friendship through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts, and interweaves elegant translations with close readings of these texts. For mid-Tang literati, writing about friendship became a powerful way to write about oneself and to reflect upon a shared culture. Their texts reveal the ways that friendship intersected the public and private realms of experience and, in the process, reshaped both.
The Chinese Political Novel
Title | The Chinese Political Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Catherine Vance Yeh |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 454 |
Release | 2020-05-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1684175550 |
"The political novel, which enjoyed a steep yet short rise to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s, is primarily concerned with the nation’s political future. It offers a characterization of the present, a blueprint of the future, and the image of the heroes needed to get there. With the standing it gained during its meteoric rise, the political novel helped elevate the novel altogether to become the leading literary genre of the twentieth century worldwide.Focusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Catherine Vance Yeh traces the genre from Disraeli’s England through Europe and the United States to East Asia. Her study goes beyond comparative approaches and nation-state- and language-centered histories of literature to examine the intrinsic connections among literary works. Through detailed studies, especially of the Chinese exemplars, Yeh explores the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes: the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global; the ways in which such a globalized literary genre maintains its core features while assuming local identity and interacting with local audiences and political authorities; and the relationship between the politics of form and the role of politics in literary innovation."