Gentlemen's Prescriptions for Women's Lives: A Thousand Years of Biographies of Chinese Women

Gentlemen's Prescriptions for Women's Lives: A Thousand Years of Biographies of Chinese Women PDF Author: Sherry J. Mou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317469933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
As far back as the first century BCE, Chinese dynastic historians - all men - began recording the achievements of Chinese women and creating a structure of understanding that would be used to limit and control them. To men, these women became role models for their daughters and wives; to the few literate women readers, they became paradigms for their own behavior. Thus, although these biographies are descriptive by nature, they actually became prescriptive. Gentlemen's Prescriptions for Women's Lives is an enlightening source for studying Chinese women of the Imperial era as well as for understanding Chinese womanhood in general. By contextualizing these biographies, the author shows us these women not just as the complaisant, calm-eyed, delicate figures that adorn Confucian texts, but also as the products of the Confucian tradition's appropriation of women.

Gentlemen's Prescriptions for Women's Lives: A Thousand Years of Biographies of Chinese Women

Gentlemen's Prescriptions for Women's Lives: A Thousand Years of Biographies of Chinese Women PDF Author: Sherry J. Mou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317469933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
As far back as the first century BCE, Chinese dynastic historians - all men - began recording the achievements of Chinese women and creating a structure of understanding that would be used to limit and control them. To men, these women became role models for their daughters and wives; to the few literate women readers, they became paradigms for their own behavior. Thus, although these biographies are descriptive by nature, they actually became prescriptive. Gentlemen's Prescriptions for Women's Lives is an enlightening source for studying Chinese women of the Imperial era as well as for understanding Chinese womanhood in general. By contextualizing these biographies, the author shows us these women not just as the complaisant, calm-eyed, delicate figures that adorn Confucian texts, but also as the products of the Confucian tradition's appropriation of women.

The Labor of Reinvention

The Labor of Reinvention PDF Author: Lin Zhang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551290
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. Zhang explores the surge in digital entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of global financial crises, the U.S.-China trade war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that the rise of internet-based industries and practices has simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Despite embracing high-tech innovation, state-led entrepreneurialization does not represent a radical break with the past. It has provided a means for implementing developmental goals while retaining the importance of the traditional family and generating new inequalities. Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by centering a non-Western perspective, The Labor of Reinvention vividly conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in China.

Knowledge, Power, and Networks

Knowledge, Power, and Networks PDF Author: Cécile Armand
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004520473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This volume examines the formidable transformation of elites in China in the Republican period and how the redistribution of power, wealth and knowledge among the newly formed elites left a deep imprint on the rise of modern China up to this day.

Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction

Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction PDF Author: Li Guo
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612496601
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest. Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals of heroism. They establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority, and open up spaces for discussions of “womanly becoming,” female exceptionalism, and shifting family power structures. The vernacular mode underlying these texts yields productive possibilities of gendered self-representations, bodily valences, and dynamic performances of sexual roles. The result is a vernacular discursive frame that enables women’s appropriation and refashioning of orthodox moral values as means of self-affirmation and self-realization. Validations of women’s political activism and loyalism to the nation attest to tanci as a premium vehicle for disseminating progressive social incentives to popular audiences. Women’s tanci marks early modern writers’ endeavors to carve out a space of feminine becoming, a discursive arena of feminine appropriation, reinvention, and boundary-crossings. In this light, women’s tanci portrays gendered mobility through depictions of a heroine’s voyages or social ascent, and entails a forward-moving historical progression toward a more autonomous and vested model of feminine subjectivity.

Masculinities in Chinese History

Masculinities in Chinese History PDF Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442222352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Masculinities in Chinese History is the first historical survey of the many ways men have acted, thought, and behaved throughout China’s long past. Bret Hinsch introduces readers to the basic characteristics of historical Chinese masculinity while highlighting the dynamic changes in male identity over the centuries. He covers the full span of Chinese history, from the Zhou dynasty in distant antiquity up to the current era of disorienting rapid change. Each chapter, focused on a specific theme and period, is organized to introduce key topics, such as differences between the sexes and the mutual influence of ideas regarding manhood and womanhood, masculine honor, how masculine ideals change, the use of high culture to bolster masculine reputation among the elite, and male role models from the margins of society. The author concludes by exploring how capitalism, imperialism, modernization, revolution, and reform have rapidly transformed ideas about what it means to be a man in contemporary China.

When "I" was Born

When Author: Jing M. Wang
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299225100
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing. When "I" Was Born: Women's Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women's roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When "I" Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women's studies, and autobiography in a global context. Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.

The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850

The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850 PDF Author: Joseph P. McDermott
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 988820808X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technology’s simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions’ expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia. “This splendid volume offers expert new insight into the ways of producing, financing, distributing, and reading printed books in early modern Europe and East Asia. This is comparative history at its best, which leaves us with a better understanding of each context and of the challenges common to book cultures across space and time.” —Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and professor of history, Harvard University “This engrossing account of the history of the book by leading specialists on the European and East Asian publishing worlds takes stock of what we know—and how much we still need to know—about the places that books had in the lives of our early modern forebears. Each chapter is masterful state-of-the-field coverage of its subject, and together they set a new standard for future studies of the book, East and West.” —Timothy Brook, author of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

The Red Brush

The Red Brush PDF Author: Wilt L. Idema
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173949
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 958

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Book Description
"One of the most exciting recent developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of an extremely rich and diverse tradition of women’s writing of the imperial period (221 B.C.E.–1911 C.E.). Many of these writings are of considerable literary quality. Others provide us with moving insights into the lives and feelings of a surprisingly diverse group of women living in Confucian China, a society that perhaps more than any other is known for its patriarchal tradition. Because of the burgeoning interest in the study of both premodern and modern women in China, several scholarly books, articles, and even anthologies of women’s poetry have been published in the last two decades. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women’s writings not only in poetry but in other genres as well, including essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction. The authors have presented the selections within their respective biographical and historical contexts. This comprehensive approach helps to clarify traditional Chinese ideas on the nature and function of literature as well as on the role of the woman writer."

Overt and Covert Treasures

Overt and Covert Treasures PDF Author: Clara Wing-chung Ho
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9629964295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
This is the first published volume on a variety of sources for Chinese women's history. It is an attempt to explore overt and covert information on Chinese women in a vast quantity of textual and nontextual, conventional and unconventional, source materials. Some chapters reread wellknown texts or previously marginalized texts, and brainstorm new ways to use and interpret these sources; others explore new sources or previously overlooked or underused materials. This book is a valuable product witnessing the concerted effort of twenty some scholars located in different parts of the world.

Battlefronts Real and Imagined

Battlefronts Real and Imagined PDF Author: D. Wyatt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230611710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.