Male Friendship in Ming China

Male Friendship in Ming China PDF Author: Martin Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047419588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This is the first interdisciplinary effort to study friendship in late imperial China from the perspective of gender history. Friendship was valorized with unprecedented enthusiasm in Ming China (1368-1644). Some Ming literati even proposed that friendship was the most fundamental relationship among the so-called “five cardinal human relationships”. Why the cult of friendship in Ming China? How was male friendship theorized, practiced and represented during that period? These are some of the questions the current volume deals with. Coming from different disciplines (history, musicology and literary studies), the contributors thoroughly explore the complexities and the gendered nature of friendship in Ming China. This volume has also been published as a special theme issue of Brill's journal NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in China.

Male Friendship in Ming China

Male Friendship in Ming China PDF Author: Martin Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047419588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first interdisciplinary effort to study friendship in late imperial China from the perspective of gender history. Friendship was valorized with unprecedented enthusiasm in Ming China (1368-1644). Some Ming literati even proposed that friendship was the most fundamental relationship among the so-called “five cardinal human relationships”. Why the cult of friendship in Ming China? How was male friendship theorized, practiced and represented during that period? These are some of the questions the current volume deals with. Coming from different disciplines (history, musicology and literary studies), the contributors thoroughly explore the complexities and the gendered nature of friendship in Ming China. This volume has also been published as a special theme issue of Brill's journal NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in China.

Conceptualizing Friendship in Time and Place

Conceptualizing Friendship in Time and Place PDF Author: Carla Risseeuw
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004344195
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
The concept of friendship is more easily valued than it is described: this volume brings together reflections on its meaning and practice in a variety of social and cultural settings in history and in the present time, focusing on Asia and the Western, Euro-American world. The extension of the group in which friendship is recognized, and degrees of intimacy (whether or not involving an erotic dimension) and genuine appreciation may vary widely. Friendship may simply include kinship bonds—solidarity being one of its more general characteristics. In various contexts of travelling, migration, and a dearth of offspring, friendship may take over roles of kinship, also in terms of care.

Sexuality in China

Sexuality in China PDF Author: Howard Chiang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295743484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
What was sex like in China, from imperial times through the post-Mao era? The answer depends, of course, on who was having sex, where they were located in time and place, and what kind of familial, social, and political structures they participated in. This collection offers a variety of perspectives by addressing diverse topics such as polygamy, pornography, free love, eugenics, sexology, crimes of passion, homosexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, masculine anxiety, sex work, and HIV/AIDS. Following a loose chronological sequence, the chapters examine revealing historical moments in which human desire and power dynamics came into play. Collectively, the contributors undertake a necessary historiographic intervention by reconsidering Western categorizations and exploring Chinese understandings of sexuality and erotic orientation.

The Objectionable Li Zhi

The Objectionable Li Zhi PDF Author: Rivi Handler-Spitz
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748397
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and actions shaped print culture, literary practice, attitudes toward gender, and perspectives on Buddhism and the afterlife. Although banned, his writings were never fully suppressed, because they tapped into issues of vital significance to generations of readers. His incisive remarks, along with the emotional intensity and rhetorical power with which he delivered them, made him an icon of his cultural moment and an emblem of early modern Chinese intellectual dissent. In this volume, leading China scholars demonstrate the interrelatedness of seemingly discrete aspects of Li Zhi’s thought and emphasize his far-reaching impact on his contemporaries and successors. In doing so, they challenge the myth that there was no tradition of dissidence in premodern China.

Translation Beyond Translation Studies

Translation Beyond Translation Studies PDF Author: Kobus Marais
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350192139
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
What is 'translation'? Even as the scholarly viewpoint of translation studies has expanded over recent years, the notion of 'translation' has remained fixedly defined by its interlinguistic element. However, there are many different contexts and disciplines in which translation takes place for which this definition is entirely unsuitable. Exploring translational aspects in contexts in which scholars do not think about 'translation', this book considers the alternative uses of the term beyond the interlinguistic dimension. Taking our understanding of 'translation' back to its basic semiotic principles, leading experts outline the wide variety of alternative fields of study, practices, applications and contexts in which the term 'translation' is used. Chapters examine 11 different fields of study, exploring what the term 'translation' means, how it is used and what it could contribute to an enlarged understanding of 'translation' as a concept. In this way, the volume argues for a reimagining of what we mean by translation, providing an essential reference for anyone interested in how translation is understood and practiced beyond the narrow perspectives of the field of translation studies itself.

The Libertine's Friend

The Libertine's Friend PDF Author: Giovanni Vitiello
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226857921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Delving into three hundred years of Chinese literature, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, The Libertine’s Friend uncovers the complex and fascinating history of male homosexual and homosocial relations in the late imperial era. Drawing particularly on overlooked works of pornographic fiction, Giovanni Vitiello offers a frank exploration of the importance of same-sex love and eroticism to the evolution of masculinity in China. Vitiello’s story unfolds chronologically, beginning with the earliest sources on homoeroticism in pre-imperial China and concluding with a look at developments in the twentieth century. Along the way, he identifies a number of recurring characters—for example, the libertine scholar, the chivalric hero, and the lustful monk—and sheds light on a set of key issues, including the social and legal boundaries that regulated sex between men, the rise of male prostitution, and the aesthetics of male beauty. Drawing on this trove of material, Vitiello presents a historical outline of changing notions of male homosexuality in China, revealing the integral part that same-sex desire has played in its culture.

Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature

Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004707638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Canvasing a range of materials that include early tales of exemplarity, medieval song lyrics, Ming-Qing poetry and plucked rhymes, twentieth century writings about revolutionaries, opera stars, missionaries, and contemporary fiction, this volume illustrates the discourse and representation of friendship in which women gain agency and participate in broader arguments about ethics, politics, and religious transcendence. Friendship prompts reflections on gender roles, becomes the venue of literary self-consciousness, and heightens the sense of literary community. Gender and community function in new ways through the public dimension of friendship, and most importantly, the intersections of gender and friendship enable us to rethink other relationships.

Reverie and Reality

Reverie and Reality PDF Author: Yanning Wang
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739179845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This is a study of Chinese gentry women’s poems on the theme of travel written during the late imperial period (ca.1600–1911), when Chinese women’s literature and culture flourished as never before. It challenges the clichéd image of completely secluded and immobile women anxiously waiting inside their prescribed feminine space, the so-called inner quarters, for the return of traveling husbands or other male kin. The travel poems discussed in this book, while not necessarily representative of all of the women writers of this period, point to the fact that many of them longed to explore the world through travel as did so many of their male counterparts. Sometimes they were able to actualize this desire for travel and sometimes they were forced to resort to imaginary “armchair travel.” In either case, women writers often used poetry as a means of recording their experiences or delineating their dreams of traveling outside the inner quarters, and indeed sometimes far away from the inner quarters. With its promise of adventure and fulfillment and, above all, a broadening of one’s intellectual and emotional horizons, travel was an important, and until now understudied, theme of late imperial women’s poetry.

The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570-1610

The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570-1610 PDF Author: Ana Carolina Hosne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135018332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The rulers of the overseas empires summoned the Society of Jesus to evangelize their new subjects in the ‘New World’ which Spain and Portugal shared; this book is about how two different missions, in China and Peru, evolved in the early modern world. From a European perspective, this book is about the way Christianity expanded in the early modern period, craving universalism. In China, Matteo Ricci was so impressed by the influence that the scholar-officials were able to exert on the Ming Emperor himself that he likened them to the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic. The Jesuits in China were in the hands of the scholar-officials, with the Emperor at the apex, who had the power to decide whether they could stay or not. Meanwhile, in Peru, the Society of Jesus was required to impose Tridentine Catholicism by Philip II, independently of Rome, a task that entailed compliance with the colonial authorities’ demands. This book explores how leading Jesuits, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) in China and José de Acosta (1540-1600) in Peru, envisioned mission projects and reflected them on the catechisms they both composed, with a remarkable power of endurance. It offers a reflection on how the Jesuits conceived and assessed these mission spaces, in which their keen political acumen and a certain taste for power unfolded, playing key roles in envisioning new doctrinal directions and reflecting them in their doctrinal texts.

Encountering Difference: New Perspectives on Genre, Travel and Gender

Encountering Difference: New Perspectives on Genre, Travel and Gender PDF Author: Gigi Adair
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622738705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This edited collection poses crucial questions about the relationship between gender and genre in travel writing, asking how gender shapes formal and thematic approaches to the various generic forms employed to represent and recreate travel. While the question of the genre of travel writing has often been debated (is it a genre, a hybrid genre, a sub-genre of autobiography?), and recent years have been much attention to travel writing and gender, these have rarely been combined. This book sheds light on how the gendered nature of writing and reading about travel affect the genre choices and strategies of writers, as well as the way in which travel writing is received. It reconsiders traditional and frequently studied forms of travel writing, both European and non-European. In addition, it pursues questions about the connections between travel writing and other genres, such as the novel and films, minor forms including journalism and blogging, and new sub-genres such as the ‘new nature writing’; focusing in particular on the political ramifications of genre in travel writing. The collection is international in focus with discussions of works by authors from Europe, Asia, Australia, and both North and South America; consequently, it will be of great interest to scholars and historians in those regions.