Crisis And Transformation In Seventeenth Century China

Describes the social and cultural transformation of seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Li Yu

Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-Century China: Plays by Tang Xianzu, Mei Dingzuo, Wu Bing, Li Yu, and Kong Shangren is a full-length study of chuanqi (romance) drama, a sophisticated form with substantial literary and meta-theatrical value that reigned in Chinese theater from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and nourished later theatrical traditions including jingju (Beijing Opera). Highly educated dramatists used chuanqi to present in artistic form personal, social, and political concerns of their time. There were six outstanding examples of these trends, considered masterpieces in their time and ever since. This study presents them in their social and cultural context during the long seventeenth century (1580D1700), the period of great experimentation and political transition. The romantic spirit and independent thinking of the late Ming elite stimulated the efflorescence of the chuanqi, and that legacy was inherited and investigated during the second half of the seventeenth-century in early Qing. Jing Shen examinees the texts to demonstrate that the playwrights appropriate, convert, or misinterpret other genres or literary works of enduring influence into their plays to convey subtle and subversive expressions in the fine margins between tradition and innovation, history and theatrical re-presentation. By exploring the components of romance in texts from late Ming to early Qing, Shen reveals creative readings of earlier themes, stories, plays and the changing idea of romanticism for chuanqi drama. This study also shows the engagement of literati playwrights in closed literary circles in which chuanqi plays became a tool by which literati playwrights negotiated their agency and social stature. The five playwrights whose works are analyzed in this book had different experiences pursuing government service as scholar-officials; some failed to achieve high office. But their common concerns and self-conscious literary choices reveal important insights into the culture of the seventeenth century, and into the sociopolitical implications of the chuanqi genre. In addition to classical Chinese commentaries on chuanqi drama, this book uses modern critical theories and terminology on Western drama to enhance the analysis of chuanqi plays.

The second and first centuries B.C. were a critical period in Chinese history—they saw the birth and development of the new Chinese empire and its earliest expansion and acquisition of frontier territories. But for almost two thousand years, because of gaps in the available records, this essential chapter in the history was missing. Fortunately, with the discovery during the last century of about sixty thousand Han-period documents in Central Asia and western China preserved on strips of wood and bamboo, scholars have been able, for the first time, to put together many of the missing pieces. In this first volume of his monumental history, Chun-shu Chang uses these newfound documents to analyze the ways in which political, institutional, social, economic, military, religious, and thought systems developed and changed in the critical period from early China to the Han empire (ca. 1600 B.C. – A.D. 220). In addition to exploring the formation and growth of the Chinese empire and its impact on early nation-building and later territorial expansion, Chang also provides insights into the life and character of critical historical figures such as the First Emperor (221– 210 B.C.) of the Ch’in and Wu-ti (141– 87 B.C.) of the Han, who were the principal agents in redefining China and its relationships with other parts of Asia. As never before, Chang’s study enables an understanding of the origins and development of the concepts of state, nation, nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, and Chineseness in ancient and early Imperial China, offering the first systematic reconstruction of the history of Chinese acquisition and colonization. Chun-shu Changis Professor of History at the University of Michigan and is the author, with Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, ofCrisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century ChinaandRedefining History: Ghosts, Spirits, and Human Society in P’u Sung-ling’s World, 1640–1715. “An extraordinary survey of the political and administrative history of early imperial China, which makes available a body of evidence and scholarship otherwise inaccessible to English-readers. The underpinning of research is truly stupendous.” —Ray Van Dam, Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan “Powerfully argues from literary and archaeological records that empire, modeled on Han paradigms, has largely defined Chinese civilization ever since.” —Joanna Waley-Cohen, Professor, Department of History, New York University

This book traces the story of East Asia from the dawn of history to the present.

As if under the satirical magnifying glass, the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan, an anonymous traditional Chinese novel, portrays local society and provincial life in seventeenth-century China in comic and grotesque close-up. A dystopian satire, the novel provides fascinating insights into the popular culture and wild imagination of men and women in late imperial China. Using an array of sources—fiction, poetry, texts on medical ethics, religious thought, political and philosophical treatises, morality books and local gazetteers—Carnival in China develops a style of reading that explores how seventeenth-century Chinese citizens perceived their world. Through their eyes, we gain access to their desires, dreams, fears and nightmares.

This book investigates the issue of conceptual originality in art criticism of the seventeenth century, a period in which China dynamically reinvented itself. In art criticism, the term which was called upon to indicate conceptual originality more than any other was "qi", literally, "different"; but secondarily, "odd," like a number and by extension, "the novel," and "extraordinary." This work finds that originality, expressed through visual difference, was a paradigmatic concern of both artists and critics. Burnett speculates on why many have dismissed originality as a possible "traditional Chinese" value, and the ramifications this has had on art historical understanding. She further demonstrates that a study of individual key terms can reveal social and cultural values and provides a linear history of the increase in critical use of "qi" as "originality" from the fifth through the seventeenth centuries, exploring what originality looks like in artworks by members of the gentry elite and commoner classes, and explains how the value lost its luster at the end of the seventeenth century.

An intimate examination of early Ch'ing China