The Empress in the Pepper Chamber
The Empress in the Pepper Chamber

Author: Olivia Milburn

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0295748761

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Zhao Feiyan (45–1 BCE), the second empress appointed by Emperor Cheng of the Han dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE), was born in slavery and trained in the performing arts, a background that made her appointment as empress highly controversial. Subsequent persecution by her political enemies eventually led to her being forced to commit suicide. After her death, her reputation was marred by accusations of vicious scheming, murder of other consorts and their offspring, and relentless promiscuity, punctuated by bouts of extravagant shopping. This first book-length study of Zhao Feiyan and her literary legacy includes a complete translation of The Scandalous Tale of Zhao Feiyan (Zhao Feiyan waizhuan), a Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) erotic novella that describes in great detail the decadent lifestyle enjoyed by imperial favorites in the harem of Emperor Cheng. This landmark text was crucial for establishing writings about palace women as the accepted forum for discussing sexual matters, including fetishism, obsession, jealousy, incompatibility in marriage, and so on. Using historical documentation, Olivia Milburn reconstructs the evolution of Zhao Feiyan’s story and illuminates the broader context of palace life for women and the novella’s social influence.

Women as Writing Subjects in High Qing China
Women as Writing Subjects in High Qing China

Author: Chengjuan Sun

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-08-01

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 9004706984

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In what ways did Qing gentry women’s concern for gender and social propriety shape their assertions of female subjectivity and agency? How did they exploit the state promotion of female virtue and Confucian morality for self-fulfillment? With a focus on three of the most widely acclaimed mid-Qing women authors, this book uses both synchronic and diachronic approaches to analyze writings on conjugal love, widowhood, women’s education, maternal teaching, boudoir objects, and history, illustrating their vibrant, gendered revision of literati poetic convention, thus proposing an alternative analytical framework that goes beyond the rigid dichotomy of compliance versus resistance.

A Little Primer of Tu Fu
A Little Primer of Tu Fu

Author: David Hawkes

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2016-06-21

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 9629968991

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The deepest and most varied of the Tang Dynasty poets, Tu Fu (Du Fu) is, in the words of David Hinton, the “first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.” Tu Fu merged the public and the private, often in the same poem, as his subjects ranged from the horrors of war to the delights of friendship, from closely observed landscapes to remembered dreams, from the evocation of historical moments to a wry lament over his own thinning hair. Although Tu Fu has been translated often, and often brilliantly, David Hawkes’s classic study, first published in 1967, is the only book that demonstrates in depth how his poems were written. Hawkes presents thirty-five poems in the original Chinese, with a pinyin transliteration, a character-by-character translation, and a commentary on the subject, the form, the historical background, and the individual lines. There is no other book quite like it for any language: a nuts-and-bolts account of how Chinese poems in general, and specifically the poems of one of the world’s greatest poets, are constructed. It’s an irresistible challenge for readers to invent their own translations.

Saying All That Can Be Said
Saying All That Can Be Said

Author: Keith McMahon

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-09-09

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1684176565

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In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as “just sex” or as “bad sex,” he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel’s way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei’s language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture’s cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in premodern China.

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality
Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality

Author: Jamie J. Zhao

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-10

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1040015190

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This Handbook offers a rich survey of topics concerning historical, modern and contemporary Chinese genders and sexualities. Exploring gender and sexuality as key dimensions of China’s modernisation and globalisation, this Handbook effectively situates Chinese gender and sexuality in transnational and transcultural contexts. It also spotlights nonnormative practices and emancipatory potentials within mainstream, heterosexual-dominated and patriarchally structured settings. It serves as a definitive study, research and resource guide for emerging gender and sexuality issues in the Chinese-speaking world. This Handbook covers interdisciplinary methodologies, perspectives and topics, including: History Literature Art Fashion Migration Translation Sex and desire Film and television Digital media Star and fan cultures Fantasies and lives of women and LGBTQ+ groups Social movements Transnational feminist and queer politics Paying acute attention to nonnormative genders and sexualities and emphasising the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity and class, this Handbook offers an essential, field-defining text to Chinese gender and sexuality studies.

The Craft of Oblivion
The Craft of Oblivion

Author: Albert Galvany

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2023-07-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1438493770

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The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.

Studies Of China And Chineseness Since The Cultural Revolution - Volume 2: Micro Intellectual History Through De-central Lenses
Studies Of China And Chineseness Since The Cultural Revolution - Volume 2: Micro Intellectual History Through De-central Lenses

Author: Chih-yu Shih

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2023-01-04

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9811260915

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Studies of China and Chineseness since the Cultural Revolution Volume 1: Reinterpreting Ideologies and Ideological ReinterpretationsHow did the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution affect everyone's lives? Why did people re/negotiate their identities to adopt revolutionary roles and duties? How did people, who lived with different self-understandings and social relations, inevitably acquire and practice revolutionary identities, each in their own light?This book plunges into the contexts of these concerns to seek different relations that reveal the Revolution's different meanings. Furthermore, this book shows that scholars of the Cultural Revolution encountered emotional and intellectual challenges as they cared about the real people who owned an identity resource that could trigger an imagined thread of solidarity in their minds.The authors believe that the Revolution's magnitude and pervasive scope always resulted in individualized engagements that have significant and differing consequences for those struggling in their micro-context. It has impacted a future with unpredictable collective implications in terms of ethnicity, gender, memory, scholarship, or career. The Cultural Revolution is, therefore, an evolving relation beneath the rise of China that will neither fade away nor sanction integrative paths.