Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.
HARVARD-YENCHING INSTITUTE MONOGRAPH SERIES
Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 58
Writing and Materiality in China
Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan
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Book Details
HARDCOVER
$60.00 • £44.95 • €54.00
ISBN 9780674010987
Publication: May 2003
672 pages
6 x 9 inches
94 illustrations
Harvard University Asia Center > Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series
World, subsidiary rights restricted
Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.
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