The Precious Raft of History

The Precious Raft of History PDF Author: Joan Judge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
This book develops a new approach to historical change at the turn of the twentieth century, a crucial stage in the unfolding of Chinese modernity. Its focus is on the fraught and momentous woman question, which foregrounded the cultural paradoxes and political aspirations that define the era. Judge probes Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West (mediated via Japan) through a close examination of the varied cultural and political uses of female biography--a genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century.

The Precious Raft of History

The Precious Raft of History PDF Author: Joan Judge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book develops a new approach to historical change at the turn of the twentieth century, a crucial stage in the unfolding of Chinese modernity. Its focus is on the fraught and momentous woman question, which foregrounded the cultural paradoxes and political aspirations that define the era. Judge probes Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West (mediated via Japan) through a close examination of the varied cultural and political uses of female biography--a genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century.

The Precious Raft of History

The Precious Raft of History PDF Author: Joan Judge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book develops a new approach to historical change at the turn of the twentieth century, a crucial stage in the unfolding of Chinese modernity. Its focus is on the fraught and momentous woman question, which foregrounded the cultural paradoxes and political aspirations that define the era. Judge probes Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West (mediated via Japan) through a close examination of the varied cultural and political uses of female biography--a genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century.

History and Popular Memory

History and Popular Memory PDF Author: Paul A Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231166362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
When people experience a traumatic event, such as war or the threat of annihilation, they often turn to history for stories that promise a positive outcome to their suffering. During World War II, the French took comfort in the story of Joan of Arc and her heroic efforts to rid France of foreign occupation. To bring the Joan narrative more into line with current circumstances, popular retellings modified the original story so that what people believed took place in the past was often quite different from what actually occurred. Paul A. Cohen believes this interplay between story and history is a worldwide phenomenon found in countries of radically different cultural, religious, and social character. He focuses on Serbia, Israel, the Soviet Union, China, Great Britain, and France, all of which experienced severe crises in the twentieth century and, in response, appropriated age-old historical narratives that resonated with what was happening in the present to serve a unifying, restorative purpose. A central theme in the book is the distinction between popular memory and history. Although vitally important to historians, this distinction is routinely blurred in people’s minds, and the historian’s truth often cannot compete with the power of a compelling story from the past, even when it has been seriously distorted by myth or political manipulation. Cohen concludes by suggesting that the patterns of interaction he probes, given their near universality, may well be rooted in certain human propensities that transcend cultural difference.

Representing Lives in China

Representing Lives in China PDF Author: Ihor Pidhainy
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1942242913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
The chapters in this ground-breaking volume examine the complex practices of biographical writing in Ming and Qing China. The authors draw on a rich variety of sources to answer some basic questions: Who were the writers of these texts and the subjects of their biographical constructions? What motivated these textual productions and sustained the routes from (re)creations to (re)publications? The informed and fascinating readings illuminate the enduring appeal of representing and represented lives in Chinese history.

Untamed Shrews

Untamed Shrews PDF Author: Shu Yang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501770632
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Untamed Shrews traces the evolution of unruly women in Chinese literature, from the reviled "shrew" to the celebrated "new woman." Notorious for her violence, jealousy, and promiscuity, the character of the shrew personified the threat of unruly femininity to the Confucian social order and served as a justification for punishing any woman exhibiting these qualities. In this book, Shu Yang connects these shrewish qualities to symbols of female empowerment in modern China. Rather than meeting her demise, the shrew persisted, and her negative qualities became the basis for many forms of the new woman, ranging from the early Republican suffragettes and Chinese Noras, to the Communist and socialist radicals. Criticism of the shrew endured, but her vicious, sexualized, and transgressive nature became a source of pride, placing her among the ranks of liberated female models. Untamed Shrews shows that whether male writers and the state hate, fear, or love them, there will always be a place for the vitality of unruly women. Unlike in imperial times, the shrew in modern China stayed untamed as an inspiration for the new woman.

Beyond Exemplar Tales

Beyond Exemplar Tales PDF Author: Joan Judge
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289730
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
“Clear, coherent, richly documented, and highly persuasive. I know of no other source devoted exclusively to the topic of Chinese women’s biographies, and I am confident that this book will have a ready audience in the China field and beyond.” -Paul Ropp, Clark University “In addition to Liu Xiang’s Lienü zhuan, the Urtext of Chinese women’s biography, this rich trove of essays explores previously unexamined biographical genres and mines literary texts for their biographical potential. It will be of great value to scholars interested in women’s history, life-writing, and biography, both in the China field and in comparative contexts.” -Grace S. Fong, McGill University

Gender Politics at Home and Abroad

Gender Politics at Home and Abroad PDF Author: Hyaeweol Choi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Choi examines how global Christian networks facilitated the flow of ideas, people and material culture, shaping gendered modernity in Korea.

The Party Family

The Party Family PDF Author: Kimberley Ens Manning
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715534
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
The Party Family explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties—specifically family ties—played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leaders of reform. Drawing on interviews with 163 participants in in the provinces of Henan and Jiangsu, as well as government documents and elite memoirs, biographies, speeches, and reports, Manning offers a new theoretical lens—attachment politics—to underscore how family and ideology intertwined to create an important building block of state capacity and governance. As The Party Family details, infant mortality in China dropped by more than half within a decade of the PRC's foundation, a policy achievement produced to a large extent through the personal and family ties of the maternalist policy coalition that led the reform movement. However, these achievements were undermined or reversed in the complex policy struggles over the family during Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958–60).

Intimate Communities

Intimate Communities PDF Author: Nicole Elizabeth Barnes
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520300467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

Photography in China

Photography in China PDF Author: Oliver Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000182479
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Emphasizing the medium’s reception among several Chinese constituencies, this book explores photography’s impact within new discourses on science, as well as its effects in social life, visual modernity and the media during China’s transition from imperial to republican government. General knowledge and academic teaching of early modern Chinese visual culture stops short of fitting photography into the larger context of visual practices and theories. This study redraws the boundaries by making photography the central concern within changing priorities of visual representation and its functions during a period of major cultural and political change. No other study draws on such intimate familiarity with the early glamour of photography as science, commerce and communication in the various local conditions of China’s cities and towns. Joining a body of critical writing that examines photography’s histories outside the familiar confines of the West, this book looks beyond the tourist and imperialist gazes of photographer-adventurers from the Western powers and Japan. It defines instead the Chinese priorities of photographic vision that are abundantly evident in surviving photographs as well as in records as various as technical manuals and personal inscriptions. Local practices and local knowledge are the keys to explain the highly successful indigenization of a medium as globalizing as photography with reference to Chinese society’s own terms and practices. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art and visual culture, the history of photography and Asian art.