Slapping the Table in Amazement

Slapping the Table in Amazement PDF Author: Mengchu Ling
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295742143
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 928

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Book Description
Slapping the Table in Amazement is the unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai�an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580�1644), originally published in 1628. The forty lively stories gathered here present a broad picture of traditional Chinese society and include characters from all social levels. We learn of their joys and sorrows, their views about life and death, and their visions of the underworld and the supernatural. Ling was a connoisseur of popular literature and a seminal figure in the development of Chinese literature in the vernacular, which paved the way for the late-imperial Chinese novel. Slapping the Table in Amazement includes translations of verse and prologue stories as well as marginal and interlinear comments.

Slapping the Table in Amazement

Slapping the Table in Amazement PDF Author: Mengchu Ling
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295742143
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 928

Get Book Here

Book Description
Slapping the Table in Amazement is the unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai�an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580�1644), originally published in 1628. The forty lively stories gathered here present a broad picture of traditional Chinese society and include characters from all social levels. We learn of their joys and sorrows, their views about life and death, and their visions of the underworld and the supernatural. Ling was a connoisseur of popular literature and a seminal figure in the development of Chinese literature in the vernacular, which paved the way for the late-imperial Chinese novel. Slapping the Table in Amazement includes translations of verse and prologue stories as well as marginal and interlinear comments.

Historian of the Strange

Historian of the Strange PDF Author: Judith T. Zeitlin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804729689
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 700

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Book Description
This is the first book in English on the seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece Liaozhai's Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi) by Pu Songling, a collection of nearly five hundred fantastic tales and anecdotes written in Classical Chinese.

Reading for the Moral

Reading for the Moral PDF Author: Maria Franca Sibau
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438469918
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.

Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity

Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity PDF Author: Cheryl C. D. Hughes
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438492162
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Crossing Borders and Confounding Identity advances our understanding of the diversity of Chinese women's experiences and achievements, from the Han Dynasty to the present. With a particular emphasis on literature and the arts, the chapters offer insights into the work of current Chinese women artists as well as literary, historical, and cultural portrayals of women and women's issues. Taken together, they provide new perspectives on Chinese women, their lived experiences and fictional representations, across a broad spectrum of literature, theater, film, and the visual arts. Accessible to nonspecialists and general readers, this book will also be a valuable resource for faculty who teach Asian studies courses in history and in the humanities, as well as for students in interdisciplinary Asian studies courses.

The Imperial Patronage of Labor Genre Paintings in Eighteenth-Century China

The Imperial Patronage of Labor Genre Paintings in Eighteenth-Century China PDF Author: Roslyn Lee Hammers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000339882
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This book examines the agrarian labor genre paintings based on the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving that were commissioned by successive Chinese emperors. Furthermore, this book analyzes the genre’s imagery as well as the poems in their historical context and explains how the paintings contributed to distinctively cosmopolitan Qing imagery that also drew upon European visual styles. Roslyn Lee Hammers contends that technologically-informed imagery was not merely didactic imagery to teach viewers how to grow rice or produce silk. The Qing emperors invested in paintings of labor to substantiate the permanence of the dynasty and to promote the well-being of the people under Manchu governance. The book includes English translations of the poems of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving as well as other documents that have not been brought together in translation. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Chinese history, Chinese studies, history of science and technology, book history, labor history, and Qing history.

Towers in the Void

Towers in the Void PDF Author: S. E. Kile
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231558244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
The maverick cultural entrepreneur Li Yu survived the tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition of the mid-seventeenth century through a commercially successful practice founded on intermedial experimentation. He engaged an astonishingly broad variety of cultural forms: from theatrical performance and literary production to fashion and wellness; from garden and interior design to the composition of letters and administrative documents. Drawing on his nonliterary work to reshape his writing, he translated this wide-ranging expertise into easily transmittable woodblock-printed form. Towers in the Void is a groundbreaking analysis of Li Yu’s work across these varied fields. It uses the concept of media to traverse them, revealing Li Yu’s creative enterprise as a remaking of early modern media forms. S. E. Kile argues that Li Yu’s cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world. He draws attention to the materiality of particular media forms, expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu’s fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today’s media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.

The Cornucopian Stage

The Cornucopian Stage PDF Author: Ariel Fox
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The long seventeenth century in China was a period of tremendous commercial expansion, and no literary genre was better equipped to articulate its possibilities than southern drama. As a form and a practice, southern drama was in the business of world-building--both in its structural imperative to depict and reconcile the social whole and in its creation of entire economies dependent on its publication and performance. However, the early modern commercial world repelled rather than engaged most playwrights, who consigned its totems--the merchant and his money--to the margins as sources of political suspicion and cultural anxiety. In The Cornucopian Stage, Ariel Fox examines a body of influential yet understudied plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights who enlisted the theatrical imaginary to very different ends. In plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, strings of cash and storehouses of silver, the Suzhou circle placed commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being. Here, Fox argues, the economic character of early modern selfhood is recast as fundamentally productive--as the basis for new subject positions, new kinds of communities, and new modes of art.

A History of Chinese Literature

A History of Chinese Literature PDF Author: Zhang Longxi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000778851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Zhang Longxi, an internationally renowned scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, is your guide to the three-millennia-long history of Chinese literature from the remote antiquity of oracle bones to contemporary works. Professor Zhang charts the development of the major literary forms in Chinese, including poetry, prose, song lyrics, and plays, and introduces the most famous poets and writers and their representative texts. Taking a period-based approach through the major dynasties, he places these forms, texts, and authors within their historical contexts and tells the fascinating story of Chinese literature with copious examples in English translation. He writes in a clear and accessible style and assumes no prior knowledge of Chinese history or Chinese literature. This book is an ideal introduction for students and the general readers who want to get a broad but thorough overview of Chinese literature in all its richness and diversity.

The Book of Swindles

The Book of Swindles PDF Author: Yingyu Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231178631
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The Book of Swindles, a seventeenth-century story collection, offers a panoramic guide to the art of deception. Ostensibly a manual for self-protection, it presents a tableau of criminal ingenuity in late Ming China. Each story comes with commentary by the author, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle.

Red's Revenge

Red's Revenge PDF Author: Jne B Lee
Publisher: Jane B Lee LLC
ISBN: 108788179X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
Dana, a seemingly innocent teen, having witnessed the brutal murder of her mother, descends into the dark underworld of drug lords and murders, relying on her martial art skills for revenge. The drug lords she chases quickly give Dana the nickname "Red" Dana assembles a small crew of romantic, confident, successful, and dangerous women and goes after the killers. Yet by day, her life revolves around her romances, father's art gallery, her child, and her extended family. Can she live in the romantic world, and still survive the depraved underworld?