The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th Century China

The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th Century China
Author: Kathryn A. Lowry
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2005
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9004145869

This study of popular songs offers a new hypothesis about the role of elite in popular culture and evidences how commercial publishing facilitated the rise of selective reading and imitation of texts in late-Ming China, creating a new basis for describing desire and the self.

A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship

A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship
Author: Jennifer Eichman
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2016-01-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004308458

Through a detailed analysis of epistolary writing, A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship: Spiritual Ambitions, Intellectual Debates, and Epistolary Connections brings to life the Buddhist discourse of a network of lay disciples who debated the value of Chan versus Pure Land, sudden versus gradual enlightenment, adherence to Buddhist precepts, and animal welfare. By highlighting the differences between their mentor, the monk Zhuhong 袾宏 (1535-1615), and his nemesis, the Yangming Confucian Zhou Rudeng 周汝登 (1547-1629), this work confronts long-held scholarly views of Confucian dominance to conclude that many classically educated, elite men found Buddhist practices a far more attractive option. Their intellectual debates, self-cultivation practices, and interpersonal relations helped shape the contours of late sixteenth-century Buddhist culture.

Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature

Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004340629

The contributors to Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions draw attention to ‘wanton woman’ themes across time as they were portrayed in court history (McMahon), fiction (Stevenson), drama (Lam, Wu), and songs and ballads (Ôki, Epstein, McLaren). Looking back, the essays challenge us with views of sexual transgression that are more heterogeneous than modern popular focus on Pan Jinlian would suggest. Central among the many insights to be found is that despite gender performance in Chinese history being overwhelmingly determined by the needs of patriarchal authority, men and women in the late imperial period discovered diverse ways in which to reflect on how men constantly sought their own bearings in reference to women.

The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music

The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music
Author: Rhiannon Mathias
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2021-12-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0429575041

The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music presents a unique collection of core research by academics and music practitioners from around the world, engaging with an extraordinarily wide range of topics on women’s contributions to Western and Eastern art music, popular music, world music, music education, ethnomusicology as well as in the music industries. The handbook falls into six parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the rich variety of subject matter the reader can expect to encounter in the handbook as a whole. Part II focuses on what might be termed the more traditional strand of feminist musicology – research which highlights the work of historical and/or neglected composers. Part III explores topics concerned with feminist aesthetics and music creation and Part IV focuses on questions addressing the performance and reception of music and musicians. The narrative of the handbook shifts in Part V to focus on opportunities and leadership in the music professions from a Western perspective. The final section of the handbook (Part VI) provides new frames of context for women’s positions as workers, educators, patrons, activists and promoters of music. This is a key reference work for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in music and gender.

Gender in Chinese Music

Gender in Chinese Music
Author: Rachel A. Harris
Publisher: University Rochester Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580464432

Gender in Chinese Music draws together contributions from ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to explore how music is implicated in changing notions of masculinity, femininity, and genders "in between" in Chinese culture.

Bandits in Print

Bandits in Print
Author: Scott W. Gregory
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2023-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501769200

Bandits in Print examines the world of print in early modern China, focusing on the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Depending on which edition a reader happened upon, The Water Margin could offer vastly different experiences, a characteristic of the early modern Chinese novel genre and the shifting print culture of the era. Scott W. Gregory argues that the traditional novel is best understood as a phenomenon of print. He traces the ways in which this particularly influential novel was adapted and altered in the early modern era as it crossed the boundaries of elite and popular, private and commercial, and civil and martial. Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Gregory turns instead to the editor-publishers who shaped the novel by crafting their own print editions. By examining the novel in its various incarnations, Bandits in Print shows that print is not only a stabilizing force on literary texts; in particular circumstances and with particular genres, the print medium can be an agent of textual change.

The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China

The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China
Author: Chun Mei
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-01-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004195939

The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of “the theatrical” to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical novel borrowed heavily from theater to conflate the theatrical and the real, juggle theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contest orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. This study showcases the theatrical novel’s unique position as a new form of literati self-representation in response to the destabilizing social and political forces of early modern China.

Music, Mind, and Language in Chinese Poetry and Performance

Music, Mind, and Language in Chinese Poetry and Performance
Author: Casey Schoenberger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2024-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198886241

"Poetry puts intent into words; singing lengthens words"--this is one of the earliest Chinese comments on artistic expression. Poetic language extends the reach of a sentiment beyond the individual, and musicality extends the reach of poetic language, not only across a room, but across geography and generations. The "extended mind thesis" (EMT) views minds as extending beyond individual nervous systems to include material and social environments. Music, Mind, and Language in Chinese Poetry and Performance: The Voice Extended offers a comprehensive overview of the interwoven histories of traditional Chinese poetry and performing arts. It employs cognitive and quantitative methods such as EMT, and a database of over six thousand traditional melodies, to describe cyclical, continuous interactions between social minds and material artifacts. From the ancient Canon of Poetry to the song-lyrics (ci) of the late medieval period and the dramatic arias of Kun and Beijing operas, Casey Schoenberger introduces the rhythms, melodies, pronunciation, and grammatical stylistics of the major Chinese verse and performance traditions. In doing so, he gleans insights from cognitive neuroscience, digital humanities, musicology, and linguistics to explain not only the trajectory of Chinese arts, but also bigger phenomena, like vernacularisation and improvisation.

Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music

Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music
Author: Maghiel van Crevel
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2009-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047441419

Wilt Idema is one of the world's leading scholars and translators of Chinese literature, with research interests ranging from classical poetry to premodern fiction, performance literature and women's writing. His oeuvre is exceptional in its inclusiveness and its ability to let different historical periods, genres and issues speak to one another, and to make the riches of Chinese literature accessible to a wide range of readers. In honor of his work, this collection brings together new research by twenty-two prominent scholars in a field of tremendous scope and diversity, on topics including genre characteristics, literary representations of social and political history, gender and cultural identity, music, autobiography, women's writing, internet literature and more.

Looking at it from Asia: the Processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science

Looking at it from Asia: the Processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science
Author: Florence Bretelle-Establet
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2010-06-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9048136768

How do Documents Become Sources? Perspectives from Asia and Science Florence Bretelle-Establet From Documents to Sources in Historiography The present volume develops a specific type of critical analysis of the written documents that have become historians’ sources. For reasons that will be explained later, the history of science in Asia has been taken as a framework. However, the issue addressed is general in scope. It emerged from reflections on a problem that may seem common to historians: why, among the huge mass of written documents available to historians, some have been well studied while others have been dismissed or ignored? The question of historical sources and their (unequal) use in historiography is not new. Which documents have been used and favored as historical sources by historians has been a key historiographical issue that has occupied a large space in the historical production of the last four decades, in France at least.