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Author: Chloë F. Starr
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9004156291
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChloe Starr's book offers a comprehensive literary reading of six nineteenth-century Chinese red-light novels and assesses how and why they alter our view of late Qing fiction and the authorial self.
Author: Chloë Starr
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2007-05-31
Total Pages: 319
ISBN-13: 9047428595
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChinese literature has traditionally been divided by both theorists and university course providers into ‘classical’ and ‘modern.’ This has left nineteenth-century fiction in limbo, and allowed negative assessments of its quality to persist unchecked. The popularity of Qing dynasty red-light fiction – works whose primary focus is the relationship between clients and courtesans, set in tea-houses, pleasure gardens, and later, brothels – has endured throughout the twentieth century. This volume explores why, arguing that these novels are far from the ‘low’ work of ‘frustrated scholars’ but in their provocative play on the nature of relations between client, courtesan and text, provide an insight into wider changes in understandings of self and literary value in the nineteenth century.
Author: Tze-Yin Teo
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2022-04-05
Total Pages: 134
ISBN-13: 153150020X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind. At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.
Author: Li Guo
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Published: 2021-06-15
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1612496601
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWomen’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.
Author: Peijie Mao
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2021-12-02
Total Pages: 413
ISBN-13: 1498544797
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines produced by the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” in early twentieth-century China. It examines the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated through a complex network of relationships between popular writers, magazine editors, and their intended readers, which were represented in various forms of popular narratives, including patriotic stories, war/military stories, family narratives, domestic fiction, utopian writings, and industrial-business stories. The author argues that the national imagination, social ideals, and the notions of ideal womanhood and the new family, were intrinsically linked and integral to the search for cultural identity of the emerging Chinese “middle society” and an expression of their collective sensibilities, experiences, and aspirations. This book suggests that the cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, one that emphasized sentiment, quotidian experience, the pursuit of the modern family and individual success, strengthening of the nation, and the reinvention of cultural tradition. Popular magazines and fiction, therefore, became uniquely instrumental in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity, which emerged and developed along the symbiotic interrelations between the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, and the real and the imaginary.
Author: Shaoling Ma
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2021-05-03
Total Pages: 198
ISBN-13: 1478013052
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the final decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty in China, technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, telegraph, and photography were both new and foreign. In The Stone and the Wireless Shaoling Ma analyzes diplomatic diaries, early science fiction, feminist poetry, photography, telegrams, and other archival texts, and shows how writers, intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries theorized what media does despite lacking a vocabulary to do so. Media defines the dynamics between technologies and their social or cultural forms, between devices or communicative processes and their representations in texts and images. More than simply reexamining late Qing China's political upheavals and modernizing energies through the lens of media, Ma shows that a new culture of mediation was helping to shape the very distinctions between politics, gender dynamics, economics, and science and technology. Ma contends that mediation lies not only at the heart of Chinese media history but of media history writ large.
Author: Howard Chiang
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-26
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 1135069786
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Sinophone framework emphasises the diversity of Chinese-speaking communities and cultures, and seeks to move beyond a binary model of China and the West. Indeed, this strikingly resembles attempts within the queer studies movement to challenge the dimorphisms of sex and gender. Bringing together two areas of study that tend to be marginalised within their home disciplines Queer Sinophone Cultures innovatively advances both Sinophone studies and queer studies. It not only examines film and literature from Mainland China but expands its scope to encompass the underrepresented ‘Sinophone’ world at large (in this case Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond). Further, where queer studies in the U.S., Europe, and Australia often ignore non-Western cultural phenomena, this book focuses squarely on Sinophone queerness, providing fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from works by the famous director Tsai Ming-Liang to the history of same-sex soft-core pornography made by the renowned Shaw Brothers Studios. By instigating a dialogue between Sinophone studies and queer studies, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of modern and contemporary China studies, particularly to those interested in film, literature, media, and performance. It will also be of great interest to those interested in queer studies more broadly.
Author: Daria Berg
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9004154833
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume develops a new style of reading Chinese sources, as pioneered in Chinese Studies by Professor Glen Dudbridge, providing fascinating new insights into Chinese literature, history and popular culture. The analysis of self-fashioning, representation and political propaganda sheds new light on Chinese perceptions of the world.
Author: Ellen Widmer
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2020-10-26
Total Pages: 355
ISBN-13: 1684170834
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the end of the Qing dynasty, works of fiction by male authors placed women in new roles. Fiction’s Family delves into the writings of one literary family from western Zhejiang whose works were emblematic of shifting attitudes toward women. The mother, Wang Qingdi, and the father, Zhan Sizeng, published their poems during the second half of the nineteenth century. Two of their four sons, Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, wrote novels that promoted reforms in women’s lives. This book explores the intergenerational link, as well as relations between the sons, to find out how the conflicts faced by the parents may have been refigured in the novels of their sons. Its central question is about the brothers’ reformist attitudes. Were they based on the pronouncements of political leaders? Were they the result of trends in Shanghai publishing? Or did they derive from Wang Qingdi’s disappointment in her “companionate marriage,” as manifested in her poems? By placing one family at the center of this study, Ellen Widmer illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the period just before it, the synchronic interplay of genres during the brothers’ lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with regions outside Shanghai.
Author: Michael Gibbs Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 309
ISBN-13: 0199892881
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBroken tools -- The name is changed, but the tale is told of you -- Double exposure -- Looking backward? -- The national classicist -- Becoming Wang Jingxuan -- Conclusion : pure and chaste writing
