Character Studies In Modern History

This book offers a thorough examination of the history of a Chinese female pronoun – the Chinese character "Ta (她, She)" and demonstrates how the invention and identification of this new word is inextricably intertwined with matters of sociocultural politics. The Chinese character Ta for the third-person feminine singular pronoun was introduced in the late 1910s when the voices of women’s liberation rang out in China. The invention and dissemination of this word not only reflected an ideological gendering of the Chinese script but also provoked heated academic and popular debate well into the 1930s. Thus, the history of Ta provides a prism through which to explore modern Chinese history. The author provides an ambitious and informed examination of how Ta was invented and promoted in relation to the gender equality movement, the politics of neologism, and other domestic elements and international catalysts. This book is the first major work to survey Ta’s creation. It draws on diverse sources, including interviews with eight historians who experienced the popularisation of Ta as youths in the 1930s and 40s. This book will be an essential read for students and scholars of East Asian Studies, Chinese Cultural History, and those who are interested in the history of China.

How was modern character made or remade at the turn of the twentieth century? Modern Character: 1888-1905 considers a range of literary and dramatic texts, showcasing the extraordinary efforts of various writers to rethink and reinvent 'human character' during this period. Arguing that many of the most significant breakthroughs happened in the small theatres of Europe in the 1890s, the book's first section demonstrates how the countervailing currents of Naturalism and Symbolism created a vortex in which time-honoured truisms about character consistency, depth, and verisimilitude were jettisoned. Works by Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Chekhov provide evidence of a searching and critical campaign against assumed models of characterization. The second section turns to contemporary prose narratives, with attention to Knut Hamsun, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Henry James, George Egerton, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Joseph Conrad, to ask what writers working in the novel, novella, and short-story forms were doing to contest prevailing expectations about represented persons. Inconsistency, bad faith, fragmentation, and unconscious motives creep into the character spaces of these fictions. Character description recedes and plots disintegrate; a penumbral negativity intrudes just where identification and sympathy might have been achieved. Ultimately, Julian Murphet proposes that the 'modern character' emerging over this decade and a half presents a radical rethinking of a venerable category of narrative and dramatic art, with profound consequences for the coming century.

Using various narrative approaches and methodologies, an international team of forty-four Johannine scholars here offers probing essays related to individual characters and group characters in the Gospel of John. These essays present fresh perspectives on characters who play a major role in the Gospel (Peter, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Thomas, and many others), but they also examine characters who have never before been the focus of narrative analysis (the men of the Samaritan woman, the boy with the loaves and fishes, Barabbas, and more). Taken together, the essays shed new light on how complex and nuanced many of these characters are, even as they stand in the shadow of Jesus. Readers of this volume will be challenged to consider the Gospel of John anew.

How did we first come to believe in a correspondence between writers' lives and their works? When did the person of the author—both as context and target of textual interpretation—come to matter so much to the way we read? This book traces the development of author centrism back to the scholarship of early Renaissance humanists. Working against allegoresis and other traditions of non-historicizing textual reception, they discovered the power of engaging ancient works through the speculative reconstruction of writers' personalities and artistic motives. To trace the multi-lingual and eventually cross-cultural rise of reading for the author, this book presents four case studies of resolutely experimental texts by and about writers of high ambition in their respective generations: Lorenzo Valla on the forger of the Donation of Constantine, Erasmus on Saint Jerome, the poet George Gascoigne on himself, and Fulke Greville on Sir Philip Sidney. An opening methodological chapter and exhortative conclusion frame these four studies with accounts of the central lexicon—character, intention, ethos, persona—and the range of genre evidence that contemporaries used to discern and articulate authorial character and purpose. Constellated throughout with examples from the works of major contemporaries including John Aubrey, John Hayward, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, this volume resurrects a vibrant culture of biographism continuous with modern popular practice and yet radically more nuanced in its strategic reliance on the explanatory power of probabilism and historical conjecture—the discursive middle ground now obscured from view by the post-Enlightenment binaries of truth and fiction, history and story, fact and fable.