City Of Marvel And Transformation

During the Tang dynasty, the imperial capital of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) was unrivaled in its monumental scale, with about one million inhabitants dwelling within its walls. It was there that one of the most enduring cultural and political institutions of the empire—the civil service examinations—took shape, bringing an unprecedented influx of literati men to the city seeking recognition and official status by demonstrating their literary talent. To these examination candidates, Chang’an was a megalopolis, career launch pad, and most importantly, cultural paradigm. As a multifaceted lived space, it captured the imaginations of Tang writers, shaped their future aspirations, and left discernible traces in the writings of this period. City of Marvel and Transformation brings this cityscape to life together with the mindscape of its sojourner-writers. By analyzing narratives of experience with a distinctive metropolitan consciousness, it retrieves lost connections between senses of the self and a sense of place. Each chapter takes up one of the powerful shaping forces of Chang’an: its siren call as a destination; the unforeseen nooks and crannies of its urban space; its potential as a “media machine” to broadcast images and reputations; its demimonde—a city within a city where both literary culture and commerce took center stage. Without being limited to any single genre, specific movement, or individual author, the texts examined in this book highlight aspects of Chang’an as a shared and contested space in the collective imagination. They bring to our attention a newly emerged interval of social, existential, and geographical mobility in the lives of educated men, who as aspirants and routine capital-bound travelers learned to negotiate urban space. Both literary study and cultural history, City of Marvel and Transformation goes beyond close readings of text; it also draws productively from research in urban history, anthropology, and studies of space and place, building upon the theoretical frameworks of scholars such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Victor Turner. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship in Chinese studies on the importance of cities and city life. Students and scholars of premodern China will find new ways to understand the collective concerns of the lettered class, as well as new ways to understand literary phenomena that would eventually influence vernacular tales and the Chinese novel. By asking larger questions about how urban sojourns shape subjectivity and perceptions, this book will also attract a wide range of readers interested in studies of personhood, spatial practice, and cities as living cultural systems in flux, both ancient and modern.

This volume explores the span of human history-and plenty of prehistory-searching out prominent and fascinating examples of cities or broader civilizations that shifted from a position of influence to a lack thereof. The accelerating threat of climate change challenges us to analyze our own communities' relationships with the wider world and to contemplate their very existence. This single-volume cultural encyclopedia examines lost cities and civilizations from every region of the globe and dated throughout human history. Arranged alphabetically, the compilation allows both students and general readers easy access to detailed entries on specific lost cities and civilizations. Throughout the geographically and chronologically diverse entries, such themes as colonization, migration, and especially climate change are developed and analyzed. Supplementing the main entries are sidebars detailing mythological cities and Investigative Boxes examining present-day cities on the brink of extinction. These round out the book's focus on disappearing cultural centers and reveal the robust relevance this material has to a world facing the crisis of climate change.

The first history of Chinese cities from their early origins to becoming the largest urban society in the world.

Fei HUANG examines the process of landscape making in Dongchuan, the key copper-mining region in Southwest China in the eighteenth century. This book demonstrates how multiple landscape experiences developed among various people in dependencies, conflicts and negotiations in the imperial frontier.

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts. By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

Capturing the Pícaro in Words discusses the framing of the transient marginals of early modern Madrid in the literary pícaro. It compares the perceptions of constables, shopkeepers, and criminals, to those of mass-produced literary representations, and argues that the literary representations "displaced" the pícaro, assigning the marginals different places in the literary texts in order to centralise the problem of urban vagrancy. The texts "spanished" the pícaro, thus establishing the image of a culturally homogenous group; and lastly, "silenced" the pícaro, under-representing the power marginals in the city derived from their knowledge of the information flows in the city.

The alliances, programs, and goals of a historic decade that continues to shape SF and the world.