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Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this is the first monograph to frame three once widely-read tanci fiction (a type of lyrical narrative) from nineteenth-century China, Meng ying yuan (1843), Yu xuan cao (1894), and Jing zhong zhuan (1895), as interrelated texts composed by three generation of members from one extended gentry family in South China. Based on the framework of family bonds, this book uses the three tanci works, authored by a mother, her daughter, and a nephew, to examine the history of how the changing aesthetics of tanci developed over China’s turbulent nineteenth century. It also demonstrates how the three writers used the genre of tanci to blur the boundaries of orthodox Confucian norms, in order to depict the evolving nature of gendered power relations at the dawn of China’s modernity.
Women’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.
This groundbreaking work provides an original and deeply knowledgeable overview of Chinese women and gender relations during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). Bret Hinsch explores in detail the central aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, religious roles, and ethics. He considers not only women’s experiences but also their emotional lives and the ideals they pursued. Drawing on a wide range of Western, Japanese, and Chinese primary and secondary sources—including standard histories, poetry, prose literature, and epitaphs—Hinsch makes an important period of Chinese women’s history accessible to Western readers.
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.
In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Maram Epstein identifies filial piety as the dominant expression of love in Qing dynasty texts. At a time when Manchu regulations made chastity the primary metaphor for obedience and social duty, filial discourse increasingly embraced the dramatic and passionate excesses associated with late-Ming chastity narratives. Qing texts, especially those from the Jiangnan region, celebrate modes of filial piety that conflicted with the interests of the patriarchal family and the state. Analyzing filial narratives from a wide range of primary texts, including local gazetteers, autobiographical and biographical nianpu records, and fiction, Epstein shows the diversity of acts constituting exemplary filial piety. This context, Orthodox Passions argues, enables a radical rereading of the great novel of manners The Story of the Stone (ca. 1760), whose absence of filial affections and themes make it an outlier in the eighteenth-century sentimental landscape. By decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, Orthodox Passions calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.
This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”
A Companion to World Literature is a far-reaching and sustained study of key authors, texts, and topics from around the world and throughout history. Six comprehensive volumes present essays from over 300 prominent international scholars focusing on many aspects of this vast and burgeoning field of literature, from its ancient origins to the most modern narratives. Almost by definition, the texts of world literature are unfamiliar; they stretch our hermeneutic circles, thrust us before unfamiliar genres, modes, forms, and themes. They require a greater degree of attention and focus, and in turn engage our imagination in new ways. This Companion explores texts within their particular cultural context, as well as their ability to speak to readers in other contexts, demonstrating the ways in which world literature can challenge parochial world views by identifying cultural commonalities. Each unique volume includes introductory chapters on a variety of theoretical viewpoints that inform the field, followed by essays considering the ways in which authors and their books contribute to and engage with the many visions and variations of world literature as a genre. Explores how texts, tropes, narratives, and genres reflect nations, languages, cultures, and periods Links world literary theory and texts in a clear, synoptic style Identifies how individual texts are influenced and affected by issues such as intertextuality, translation, and sociohistorical conditions Presents a variety of methodologies to demonstrate how modern scholars approach the study of world literature A significant addition to the field, A Companion to World Literature provides advanced students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in world literature and literary theory.
This book intends to trace the revival of traditional literary works since the 1980s in China as it is revealed on the revitalized College Entrance Examination (CEE). In order to show how these changes reflect China’s altering ideology after the fall of Communism, selections from the CEE’s literary portion will be examined. Taking advantage of the resurrection of the powerful CEE, test creators have composed the literary portion as an education tool to shape public opinion in the post-Communist era. Literature in China have never been an independent art but had shared the responsibility for transmitting China’s intellectual and ethical traditions. The introduction of Communism to China silenced these traditions and made literature the servant of political ideology. This book traces the chronological process of restoring modern vernacular literature from the pre-Communist era and the ways in which traditional literature is being used for modern purposes. For many Chinese intellectuals, the gradual withdrawal of literature for serving political causes and the reinstatement of classical literature and early vernacular works to on the CEE bring to light the recovery of the aesthetic literary tradition and a return to normalcy. When students take the CEE, they not only mentally scrutinize literature that they first read during their secondary education, but also experience an assertive presentation of current Chinese cultural values and outlooks on life. This study argues that in the post-1980s CEE literary selections, students experience a variety of texts that summon up China’s pre-Communist literary tradition in order to serve as an intellectual guiding light for future social development. For those interested in comparative higher education, a particular area of interest may be the book’s singular consideration of the science and technology passages in connection with the restructuring of higher education in China as a remedy of China’s cultural tradition.
The surviving examples of the early medieval "shelun," a subgenre of the "fu," are translated and interpreted against their political background in this original contribution to Chinese "Nanbeichao" studies.
As the essence of Chinese traditional culture, classical Chinese poetry in Singapore played a very important role in the social and cultural development of Singapore’s Chinese community. Numerous poems depicted the unique scenery of tropical rainforest and the customs with a Nanyang flavor, recorded the various historical events from the colonial era, the World War II to the independent nation, and reflected the poets’ multiple feelings. This book sketches out the brief history of classical Chinese poetry in Singapore over a hundred years, and focuses on the complex identity of poets from different generations, the function of literary societies in the construction of cultural space and the influence of modern media on the development of classical Chinese poetry based on the text interpretation. In addition, the author attempts to define different types of poetry writing using diaspora literature and Sinophone literature. The discussion of these topics will not only expand the research horizon of Chinese literature, but also provide a meaningful reference to the studies of the worldwide Chinese overseas, especially in Southeast Asia.