Writing and Materiality in China

Writing and Materiality in China
Author: Judith T. Zeitlin
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 662
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684170427

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. 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.

Un Lun Dun

Un Lun Dun
Author: China Miéville
Publisher: Del Rey
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2007-02-13
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0345497236

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Endlessly inventive . . . [a] hybrid of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Phantom Tollbooth.”—Salon What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too–including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book. When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from China Mieville’s Embassytown. Praise for Un Lun Dun “Miéville fills his enthralling fantasy with enough plot twists and wordplay for an entire trilogy, and that is a good thing. A-.”—Entertainment Weekly “For style and inventiveness, turn to Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville, who throws off more imaginative sparks per chapter than most authors can manufacture in a whole book. Mieville sits at the table with Lewis Carroll, and Deeba cavorts with another young explorer of topsy-turvy worlds.”—The Washington Post Book World “Delicious, twisty, ferocious fun . . . so crammed with inventions, delights, and unexpected turns that you will want to start reading it over again as soon as you’ve reached the end.”—Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners “[A] wondrous thrill ride . . . Like the best fantasy authors, [Miéville] fully realizes his imaginary city.” —The A.V. Club “Mieville's compelling heroine and her fantastical journey through the labyrinth of a strange London forms that rare book that feels instantly like a classic and yet is thoroughly modern.”—Holly Black, bestselling author of The Spiderwick Chronicles

Beyond Sinology

Beyond Sinology
Author: Andrea Bachner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231536305

New communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from a variety of alternative theoretical perspectives, Beyond Sinology reflects on the Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections between languages, scripts, and medial expressions and cultural and national identities. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete "scripting" of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. Chinese writing—with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization—can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.

The Edge of Knowing

The Edge of Knowing
Author: Roy Bing Chan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295999004

Reveals the historical impact of dream rhetoric on Chinese modernity and nation-building Realism and the rhetoric of dreams intersected in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The Edge of Knowing investigates this relationship, showing how writers’ attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People’s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing will appeal to readers seeking to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.

Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy

Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy
Author: Lei Xue
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0295746351

Eulogy for Burying a Crane (Yi he ming) is perhaps the most eccentric piece in China’s calligraphic canon. Apparently marking the burial of a crane, the large inscription, datable to 514 CE, was once carved into a cliff on Jiaoshan Island in the Yangzi River. Since the discovery of its ruins in the early eleventh century, it has fascinated generations of scholars and calligraphers and been enshrined as a calligraphic masterpiece. Nonetheless, skeptics have questioned the quality of the calligraphy and complained that its fragmentary state and worn characters make assessment of its artistic value impossible. Moreover, historians have trouble fitting it into the storyline of Chinese calligraphy. Such controversies illuminate moments of discontinuity in the history of the art form that complicate the mechanism of canon formation. In this volume, Lei Xue examines previous epigraphic studies and recent archaeological finds to consider the origin of the work in the sixth century and then trace its history after the eleventh century. He suggests that formation of the canon of Chinese calligraphy over two millennia has been an ongoing process embedded in the sociopolitical realities of particular historical moments. This biography of the stone monument Eulogy for Burying a Crane reveals Chinese calligraphy to be a contested field of cultural and political forces that have constantly reconfigured the practice, theory, and historiography of this unique art form. Art History Publication Initiative A McLellan Book

Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China

Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9004349375

Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.

Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China
Author: Antje Richter
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013-06-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0295804661

Honorable Mention for the 2016 Kayden Book Award This first book-length study in Chinese or any Western language of personal letters and letter-writing in premodern China focuses on the earliest period (ca. 3rd-6th cent. CE) with a sizeable body of surviving correspondence. Along with the translation and analysis of many representative letters, Antje Richter explores the material culture of letter writing (writing supports and utensils, envelopes and seals, the transportation of finished letters) and letter-writing conventions (vocabulary, textual patterns, topicality, creativity). She considers the status of letters as a literary genre, ideal qualities of letters, and guides to letter-writing, providing a wealth of examples to illustrate each component of the standard personal letter. References to letter-writing in other cultures enliven the narrative throughout. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China makes the social practice and the existing textual specimens of personal Chinese letter-writing fully visible for the first time, both for the various branches of Chinese studies and for epistolary research in other ancient and modern cultures, and encourages a more confident and consistent use of letters as historical and literary sources.

Superfluous Things

Superfluous Things
Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2004-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780824828202

Now in paperback This outstanding and original book, presented here with a new preface, examines the history of material culture in early modern China. Craig Clunas analyzes “superfluous things”—the paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, and other objects owned by the elites of Ming China—and describes contemporary attitudes to them. He informs his discussions with reference to both socio-cultural theory and current debates on eighteenth-century England concerning luxury, conspicuous consumption, and the growth of the consumer society.

Impagination – Layout and Materiality of Writing and Publication

Impagination – Layout and Materiality of Writing and Publication
Author: Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2021-01-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110698757

This volume is the first comparative history that studies the practice of impagination across different ages and civilizations. By impagination we mean the act of placing and arranging spatially textual and other information onto a material bearer that could be made of a variety of materials (papyrus, bamboo slips, palm leaf, parchment, paper, and the computer screen). This volume investigates three levels of impagination: what is the page or other unit of the material bearer, what is written or printed on it, and how is writing or print placed on it. It also examines the interrelations of two or all three of these levels. Collectively it examines the material and materiality of the page, the variety of imprints, cultural and historical conventions for impagination, interlinguistic encounters, the control of editors, scribes, publishers and readers over the page, inheritance, borrowing and innovation, economics, aesthetics and socialities of imprints and impagination, and the relationship of impagination to philology. This volume supplements studies on mise en page and layout – an important subject of codicology – first by including non-codex writings, second by taking a closer look at the page or other unit than at the codex (or book), and third by its aspiration to adopt a globally comparative approach. This volume brings together for comparison vast geographical realms of learning, including Europe, China, Tibet, Korea, Japan and the Near Eastern and European communities in which the Hebrew Bible was transmitted. This comparison is significant, for Europe, China, and India all developed great traditions of learning which came into intensive contact. The contributions to this volume are firmly rooted in local cultures and together address global, comparative themes that are significant for multiple disciplines, such as intellectual and cultural history of knowledge (both humanistic and scientific), global history, literary and media studies, aesthetics, and studies of material culture, among other fields.

Railsea

Railsea
Author: China Miéville
Publisher: Del Rey
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345524543

“Other names besides [Herman] Melville’s will surely come to mind as you read this thrilling tale—there’s Dune’s Frank Herbert. . . . But in this, as in all of his works, Miéville has that special knack for evoking other writers even while making the story wholly his own.”—Los Angeles Times On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death & the other’s glory. Spectacular as it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than the endless rails of the railsea—even if his captain thinks only of hunting the ivory-colored mole that took her arm years ago. But when they come across a wrecked train, Sham finds something—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—that leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters & salvage-scrabblers. & it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “[Miéville] gives all readers a lot to dig into here, be it emotional drama, Godzilla-esque monster carnage, or the high adventure that comes only with riding the rails.”—USA Today “Superb . . . massively imaginative.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Riveting . . . a great adventure.”—NPR “Wildly inventive . . . Every sentence is packed with wit.”—The Guardian (London)