Distributed by Harvard University Press
•Use pull-down menu to browse other new books
•bookmark this page to see regular updates
China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History
In Lost Modernities, Alexander Woodside offers an overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations. This book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history.
Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China
In Classical China, crafted artifacts offered a material substrate for abstract thought as graphic paradigms for social relationships. Focusing on the fifth to second centuries b.c., Martin Powers explores how these paradigms continued to inform social thought long after the material substrate had been abandoned. Historically, Pattern and Person traces the evolution of personhood in China from a condition of hereditary status to one of achieved social role and greater personal choice.
Visions of Poetic Competence in the Chinese Tradition
As traced in Words Well Put, the vision of poetic competence evolved for over a millennium from calculated performances of inherited words to sincere passionate outbursts to displays of verbal wit combining calculation with the appearance of spontaneity. This book tells the story of the development of poetic competence to uncover the complexity of the concept and to identify the sources and exemplars of that complexity.
Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860)
In this continuation of the literary history of the Tang, Stephen Owen analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of styles, genres, and the voices of past poets--a repertoire that would endure.
The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Huajian Ji (Collection from Among the Flowers)
Compiled in 940 at the court of the kingdom of Shu, the Huajian ji is the earliest extant collection of song lyrics by literati poets. In this book, Anna Shields examines the influence of court culture on the creation of the anthology and the significance of imitation and convention in its lyrics. By illuminating the historical and literary contexts of the anthology, the author aims to situate the Huajian ji within larger questions of Chinese literary history.
Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China
The goal of Worldly Stage is to show how the theater acquired the figurative power to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. Conceptions of theatrical spectatorship, Sophie Volpp argues, helped shape a discourse on social spectatorship that suggested how a discerning person might evaluate the performance of status.
The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics
Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. During the quarter century Huizong ruled, the greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.
Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China
This study of Chinese women in the book trade begins with three case studies, each of which probes one facet of the relationship between women and fiction in the early nineteenth century. Building on these case studies, the second half of the book focuses on the many sequels to the Dream of the Red Chamber and the significance of this novel for women. As Ellen Widmer shows, by the end of the century, women became increasingly involved in the novel as critical readers, writers, and editors.
Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China
Distinctive female dress styles, gender divisions of labor, and powerful same-sex networks have long distinguished villages in this coastal region of southeastern China from other rural Han communities. Intimate Politics explores these practices that have constituted eastern Hui'an residents, women in particular, as an anomaly among rural Han. This book asks what such practices have come to mean in a post-1949 socialist order that has incorporated forms of marriage, labor, and dress into a developmental scale extending from the primitive to the civilized.
Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s
The activities of Japanese advertisers helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s. This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the twentieth century. William Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of individual subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of "mass media."
Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou
Founded in the 1820s, the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) was one of the premier academies of the nineteenth century. In The Sea of Learning, Steven Miles examines the construction of the celebratory discourse that portrayed the Xuehaitang as having radically altered literati culture in Guangzhou. Arguing that the academy did not exist in a scholarly vacuum, Miles contends that its location embedded it in social settings and networks that determined who utilized its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.
The Invention of China in Modern World Making
This book brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the invention of "China," "the East," "the West," and the modern notion of "the world" in recent history.
Native-Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing
Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that characterized traditional China and worked against the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, the native-place lodges generated a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms undertaken in the early twentieth century.
An International History
Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.
Takano Choei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan
This book argues that the study of Western medicine was a dynamic activity that brought together doctors from all over the country in efforts to effect social change. By examining the social impact of Western learning at the level of everyday life rather than simply its impact at the theoretical level, the book offers a broad picture of the way in which Western medicine, and Western knowledge, was absorbed and adapted in Japan.
Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930
A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants' lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era.
This volume presents two histories of the early Korean kingdom of Paekche (trad. 18 BCE-660 CE). The first, written by Jonathan Best, is based largely on primary sources, both written and archaeological. This initial history of Paekche serves, in part, to introduce the second, an extensively annotated translation of the oldest history of the kingdom, the Paekche Annals (Paekche pon'gi).
National Security, Party Politics, and International Status
This study focuses on postwar Japan's foreign policy making in the political and security areas, the core UN missions. The intent is to illustrate how policy goals forged by national security concerns, domestic politics, and psychological needs gave shape to Japan's complicated and sometimes incongruous policy toward the UN since World War II.
In an era of accelerated globalization, the relationship between diaspora philanthropy and the economic and social development of many countries is increasingly relevant. This volume aims to advance understanding of diaspora philanthropy in the Chinese American and Indian American communities, especially the implications for development of the world's two most populous countries.
Actors and Their Art
This book explores how memories of the past become traditions, and the role of these traditions in the institutional development of the noh theater from its beginnings in the fourteenth century through the late twentieth century. It focuses on the development of the key traditions that constitute the "ethos of noh," the ideology that empowered certain groups of actors at the expense of others, and how this ethos fostered noh's professionalization. The author argues that the traditions that form the ethos of noh, such as those surrounding masks and manuscripts, are the key traits that define it as an art.
Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895
Until 300 years ago, the Chinese considered Taiwan a "land beyond the seas," a "ball of mud" inhabited by "naked and tattooed savages." The incorporation of this island into the Qing empire in the seventeenth century and its evolution into a province by the late nineteenth century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of the Chinese domain. By viewing Taiwan-China relations as a product of the history of Qing expansionism, the author contributes to our understanding of current political events in the region.