Bøger i Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series serien

Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers' memories during the Ming-Qing cataclysm. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events. This embodied experience reveals literature's mission of remembrance as a moral endeavor in cultural continuity.

Through research into Daoist ritual in history and as it survives today, Andersen shows that the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way, and consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.

Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. Kim examines how the impact of political organization in one era can endure in a group's social and cultural values.

"Song Lyric," ci, is one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry, radically distinct from "Classical Poetry," shi. Stephen Owen examines song lyric's literary traditions, including its origins, major writers and collections, and development into a genre, while offering a new hypothesis on the relationship between song practice and written text.

Ya Zuo places Shen Gua (1031 1095) on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology. Her study provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of diversity in Chinese thinking.

China's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented explosion in the production of woodblock-printed books. This volume considers what a wide range of late Ming books reveal about their readers' ideas of a pleasurable private life, as well as their orientations toward early modernity and toward traditional Chinese sources of authority.

David M. Robinson explores how grand displays like the royal hunt, archery contests, and the imperial menagerie were presented in literature and art in the early Ming dynasty. He argues these spectacles were highly contested sites where emperors and court ministers staked competing claims about rulership and the role of the military in the polity.

Bossler traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries by examining three critical categories of women: courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives. Bossler illustrates how these groups intersected and interacted with men, influencing the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Li Mengyang (1473-1530) was a scholar-official who initiated the literary archaist movement that sought to restore ancient styles of prose and poetry in sixteenth-century China. Chang Woei Ong situates Li's quest to redefine literati learning as a way to build a perfect social order in the context of intellectual transitions since the Song dynasty.

Rebecca Doran offers a new understanding of major female figures of the Tang era-including Wu Zhao, Empress Wei, and Shangguan Wan'er-within their literary-historical contexts, and delves into critical questions about the relationship between Chinese historiography, reception-history, and the process of image-making and cultural construction.

Scholars have described the eighteenth century in China as a time of "state activism" and often associate the Taiping Rebellion and postbellum restoration efforts with the origins of elite activism. Seunghyun Han, however, argues that the ascendance of elite activism can be traced to the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns in the early nineteenth century.

In Northern Song China, reform-minded statesmen sought to remove the tension between the Confucian Classics and statist ideals of "big government." Jaeyoon Song illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage of classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.

Sarah M. Allen explores the tale literature of eighth- and ninth-century China to show how written tales of the Tang canon we know today grew out of a fluid culture of hearsay in elite society. The book focuses on two main types of tales, those based in gossip about recognizable public figures and those developed out of lore concerning the occult.

Wai-yee Li examines the discursive space of women in seventeenth-century China. Using texts written by women or by men writing in a feminine voice, as well as writings that turn women into signifiers of lamentation or nostalgia, Li probes the emotional and psychological turmoil of the Ming-Qing transition and subsequent moments of national trauma.

After the 1911 fall of the Qing dynasty, many declared the classical Chinese poetic tradition dead. In Modern Archaics, Shengqing Wu draws on extensive archival research into the poetry collections and literary journals of two generations of writers to challenge this claim and demonstrate the continuing significance of the classical form.

An exception to the rule that the first-rank poets in premodern China were men, the woman poet Li Qingzhao (1084-1150s) occupies a crucial place in Chinese literature. Ronald C. Egan challenges conventional thinking about Li, examining how critics tried to accommodate her to cultural norms from late imperial times into the twentieth century.

The rapid rise and fall of the southern kingdom of Wu inspired many memorials in the former capital city of Suzhou, including the building of temples, shrines, and monuments. Analyzing the history of Wu as recorded in ancient Chinese texts and literature, Olivia Milburn illuminates the cultural endurance of this powerful but short-lived kingdom.

Tamara T. Chin explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance ("Silk Road") markets. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets.

The dominant literary genre in Song dynasty China, shi poetry reflected profound changes occurring in Chinese culture from 960-1279. Michael Fuller traces the intertwining of shi poetry and Neo-Confucianism that led to the cultural synthesis of the last years of the Southern Song and set the pattern of Chinese society for the next six centuries.

Examining the transnational film star system and the formations of historically important stars, Making Personas casts new light on Japanese modernity from the 1910s to 1930s. The book shows how film stardom began and evolved, looking at the production, representation, circulation, and reception of performers' images in film and other media.

Friendships between writers of the mid-Tang era became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. Anna M. Shields explores these texts to reveal the complex value the writers found in friendship-as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding.

Through an exploration of contemporary Chinese popular religion from its cultural, social, and material perspectives, Wei-Ping Lin paints a broad picture of the dynamics of popular religion in Taiwan. Analyzing these aspects of religious practice in a unified framework, she traces their transformation as adherents move from villages to cities.

The first book of its kind in any Western language, Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture brings into focus a cluster of issues that are central to the understanding of both the poet and his cultural milieu. Together, the chapters form a varied mosaic of Wang Anshi's work and its critical reception in the larger context of Song poetic culture.

Building for Oil is a historical account of the oil town of Daqing in northeastern China during the formative years of the People's Republic and describes Daqing's rise and fall as a national model city. Hou Li traces the roots of the Chinese socialist state and its early industrialization and modernization policies.

Celestial Masters is the first book in any Western language devoted solely to the founding of Daoism. It traces the movement from the mid-second century CE through the sixth century, and provides a detailed analysis of ritual life within the movement, covering the roles of common believer or Daoist citizen, novice, and priest or libationer.

In his reading of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China, Jack W. Chen presents an extended meditation on the anecdote form, both what it affords in terms of representing a social community and how it provides a space for the rehearsal of certain longstanding philosophical and cultural arguments.

Lucas Bender considers Du Fu's pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry's relationship to ethics.

Alexander Des Forges reads shiwen from a literary perspective, showing how the examination essay redefined prose aesthetics, transformed the work of writing, and marked the aesthetic as a key arena for contestation of authority as candidates, examiners, and critics joined to form a dominant social class of literary producers.