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Elegant Life of the Chinese Literati

Author: Zhenheng Wen

Publisher: Shanghai Press

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781602200395

"This is the first complete translation of the early 17th century Chinese scholar Wen Zhenheng's guide to good taste in late Ming Dynasty China. This translation now presents the entirety of Wen's Treatise on Superfluous Things, his description of how the gentleman-scholar can order his establishment so as to achieve harmony and elegance. Wen covers almost every aspect of the physical and intellectual life of the Chinese literati class both inside and outside the home, from flowers and plants, the building of ponds and pavilions to the choice of furniture and fittings and the hanging of pictures and calligraphy. The whole amounts to a view of the sophistication of Chinese culture as the Ming dynasty approached its end. The text is accompanied by carefully chosen illustrations that provide a physical and historical context to the many artefacts mentioned in the text, they also convey a sense of the fabric of the daily life of a privileged class and of the economy that sustained it. This book will interest the general reader as much as the specialist. There are hints for the gardener as well as information for the collector. At the same time, its approach to our relationship with the natural world reflects present-day concerns."--

The Last of China's Literati

Author: Bell Yung

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 9622099165

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In this biography of Tsar Teh-yun, centenarian poet, calligrapher, and qin master, Professor Bell Yung tells the story of a life steeped in the refined arts faithful to the traditional way of the Chinese literati. Set in the two cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong, this book recounts the experiences of an individual who lived through war, displacement, exile, and unrequited longing for home and for a style of living lost forever. Yet Madame Tsar sustained, as one of its last exemplars, much of that style of living despite being a woman in the largely male world of the refined arts. The author weaves a picture of an extraordinary but also tragic figure: extraordinary as daughter, wife, mother, and a celebrated musician, poet, and calligrapher; tragic as a member of the literati exiled from Shanghai to Hong Kong and always longing for the lost world of the refined arts. She was known particularly for her accomplishments as a teacher and performer on the qin – instrument par excellence of the literati. The book delves into her teaching method and musical style to a degree rarely found in the literature of this kind, and is thus an important contribution to musicological study. Through this life of one member of China's last generation of literati, Professor Yung provides rich material for anyone interested in the cultural and social history of twentieth-century China, especially for those with a special interest in qin music, or the place of women in this period.

Folk Literati, Contested Tradition, and Heritage in Contemporary China

Author: Ziying You

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2020-02-11

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0253046394

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In this important ethnography Ziying You explores the role of the "folk literati" in negotiating, defining, and maintaining local cultural heritage. Expanding on the idea of the elite literati—a widely studied pre-modern Chinese social group, influential in cultural production—the folk literati are defined as those who are skilled in classical Chinese, knowledgeable about local traditions, and capable of representing them in writing. The folk literati work to maintain cultural continuity, a concept that is expressed locally through the vernacular phrase: "incense is kept burning." You's research focuses on a few small villages in Hongtong County, Shanxi Province in contemporary China. Through a careful synthesis of oral interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, You presents the important role the folk literati play in reproducing local traditions and continuing stigmatized beliefs in a community context. She demonstrates how eight folk literati have reconstructed, shifted, and negotiated local worship traditions around the ancient sage-Kings Yao and Shun as well as Ehuang and Nüying, Yao's two daughters and Shun's two wives. You highlights how these individuals' conflictive relationships have shaped and reflected different local beliefs, myths, legends, and history in the course of tradition preservation. She concludes her study by placing these local traditions in the broader context of Chinese cultural policy and UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage program, documenting how national and international discourses impact actual traditions, and the conversations about them, on the ground.

The Quest for Gentility in China

Author:

Publisher: Routledge

Published:

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1134077041

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Telling Details

Author: Jiwei Xiao

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-09

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 100053331X

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What is a detail? How is it different from xijie, its Chinese counterpart? Is "reading for the details" fundamentally different from "reading for the plot"? Did xijie xiaoshuo, the Chinese novel of details, give the world its earliest form of modern fiction? Inspired by studies of vision and modernity as well as cinema, this book gazes out on the larger world through the small aperture of the detail, highlighting how concrete literary minutiae become "telling" as they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the vibrations of the mind, the complexity of the everyday, and the imperative to recognize the minute, the humble, and the hidden. In a strain of masterpieces of xijie xiaoshuo, such details play a key role in pivoting the novel from didacticism towards a capacious modern form. Examining the Chinese detail as both a common idiom and a unique concept, and extrapolating it from individual works to the culture at large, reveals under-explored areas of the Chinese novel: its psychological depths, its connections with other genres and forms, its partaking in Chinese material life and capitalist modernity, as well as repressions and difficulties surrounding its reception in national and international contexts. With carefully chosen case studies, Xiao’s book not only exemplifies the value of deep reading in approaching complex works of Chinese fiction as world literature, it also throws light on the aesthetics and politics of "the unseen," which has become central to a humanist tradition that flows across literature, cinema, and other art forms.

Vignettes from the Late Ming

Author:

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 029580226X

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This anthology presents seventy translated and annotated short essays, or hsiao-p’in, by fourteen well-known sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Chinese writers. Hsiao-p’in, characterized by spontaneity and brevity, were a relatively informal variation on the established classical prose style in which all scholars were trained. Written primarily to amuse and entertain the reader, hsiao-p’in reflect the rise of individualism in the late Ming period and collectively provide a panorama of the colorful life of the age. Critics condemned the genre as escapist because of its focus on life’s sensual pleasures and triviality, and over the next two centuries many of these playful and often irreverent works were officially censored. Today, the essays provide valuable and rare accounts of the details over everyday life in Ming China as well as displays of wit and delightful turns of phrase.

The Quest for Gentility in China

Author: Daria Berg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-12-07

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1134077033

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The quest for gentility has shaped Chinese civilization and the formation of culture in China until the present day. This book analyzes social aspirations and cultural practices in China from 1550 to 1999, showing how the notion of gentility has evolved and retained its relevance in China from late imperial times until the modern day. Gentility denotes the way of the gentleman and gentlewoman. The concept of gentility transcends the categories of gender and class and provides important new insights into the ways Chinese men and women lived their lives, perceived their world and constructed their cultural environment. In contrast to analyses of the elite, perceptions of gentility relate to ideals, ambitions, desires, social capital, cultural sophistication, literary refinement, aesthetic appreciation, moral behaviour, femininity and gentlemanly elegance, rather than to actual status or power. Twelve international leading scholars present multi-disciplinary approaches to explore the images, artefacts and transmission of gentility across the centuries in historical and literary situations, popular and high culture, private and official documents, poetry clubs, garden culture and aesthetic guidebooks. This volume changes the ways we look at Chinese cultural history, literature, women and gender issues and offers new perspectives on Chinese sources.

The Embrace of Capital

Author: Don Milligan

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2022-04-29

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1789048028

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The "spectre of communism" which Karl Marx confidently evoked in 1848 is now nothing more than a ghostly and ghastly nightmare, without form or substance. This is because working people have developed a love-hate relationship with capitalism. They hate insecurity, inequality, and greed, and love civic and political freedom. They love mass consumption, and accept the logic of commerce. Barreling along through wars, revolutions, epidemics, and crises of all sorts, working people in their millions have consistently dumfounded and dismayed the left, by their refusal to countenance any alternative to the capitalist mode of life. We have to ask: Is it possible to reverse this reality, and once again talk of the necessity of communism?

An Illustrated Brief History of Chinese Gardens

Author: Hardie Alison

Publisher: Shanghai Press

Published: 2022-10-10

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1938368886

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There are many books published in English on Chinese gardens, but the majority are primarily picture books with little informative content. With a large number of illustrations of Chinese gardens, ancient paintings, block prints, and other artefacts, this book is a social history of Chinese gardens and focuses on how gardens have functioned and been used in Chinese society through the ages. Apart from the aesthetic or philosophical aspects of Chinese gardens, you may see how gardens functioned as real estate, how they gave opportunities of employment to skilled artisans, how they opened up outdoor space to both elite and lower-class women, how they allowed men of different social classes and of different ethnicities to interact and gain mutual benefit: in short, how the existence of gardens exerted an influence on society as a whole. At the same time, the reader can find how the wider society, and even socio-economic changes beyond China's own borders, had an impact on how gardens in China developed.