Search results

This second volume of the ongoing annotated translation of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih chi (The Grand Scribe's Records), widely acknowledged as the most important early Chinese history, contains the "basic annals" of five early Han-dynasty emperors. The annals trace the first century of Han rule (206 b.c. to ca. 100 b.c.) in a year-by-year account that focuses on imperial activities. In these later annals, Ssu-ma Ch'ien revitalized the style he had employed in accounts of previous rulers in the opening...

Investigating the historical tradition of Chinese architectural writing from antiquity to the twelfth century, Chinese Architecture and Metaphor reveals significant and fascinating social and cultural phenomena in the most important primary text for the study of the Chinese building tradition. Unlike previous scholarship, which has reviewed this imperially commissioned architectural manual largely as a technical work, this volume considers the Yingzao fashi's unique literary value and explores t...

The Chinese essay is arguably China's most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity - the mid-1930s - is the central concern of this book. What Charles Laughlin terms ""the literature of leisure"" is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informal essay writing (xiaopin wen). Laughlin examines the essay both as a widely practiced and influential genre of lit...

The portrayal of historical atrocity in fiction, film, and popular culture can reveal much about the function of individual memory and the shifting status of national identity. In the context of Chinese culture, films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness and Lou Ye's Summer Palace and novels such as Ye Zhaoyan's Nanjing 1937: A Love Story and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age collectively reimagine past horrors and give rise to new historical narratives. Michael Berry takes an innovative look a...

"I have lived in Beijing for thirty years, but I can't say that I have yet comprehended this city," wrote Lao Xiang, the great Chinese novelist, in 1935. Mapping Modern Beijing explores the various ways novelists sought to understand and articulate China's second largest city in the first half of twentieth century. Song investigates five modes of representing Beijing: as a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural p...

This volume analyzes the representation of gender and desire in elite, male-authored literary texts in China dating from roughly 200 B.C. until 1000 A.D. Above all, it discusses the intimate relationship between the representation of gender and the political and social self-representations of elite men and shows where gender and social hierarchies cross paths. Rouzer argues that when male authors articulated themselves as women, the resulting articulation was inevitably influenced by this act of...

Ben shu fen wei cha yuan pian, Cha lei pian, Ming cha pian, Cha ju pian, Cha yi pian, Cha yin pian he cha feng pian qi zhang, Gao du gai kuo le zhong guo cha wen hua de ge ge fang mian he ji qian nian de fa zhan shi.

This book engages with the critical decline of postmodernism and newer currents of thinking that have come to the fore, including postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural studies, constituting an exploration of the cultural landscape after the heyday of postmodernism in the West and its profound influence on the Chinese cultural scene.Topics discussed include the prevalent theoretical trends and cultural phenomena in the West in the wake of postmodernism, how these developments have influenced co...