Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual
arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy,
and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What
...happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography,
a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that
reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores
how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese
aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between
poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras,
examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the
new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into
illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs,
Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and
genres, including self-representation in portrait photography;
gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of
beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined
landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided
rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and
embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological
and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning
literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo
Poetics is an original account of media culture in early
twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and
visual modernities.
The Northern Song (960–1126) was one of the most transformative periods in Chinese literary history, characterized by the emergence of printing and an ensuing proliferation of books. The poet Huang ...Tingjian (1045–1105), writing at the height of this period, both defined and was defined by these changes. The first focused study on the cultural consequences of printing in Northern Song China, this book examines how the nascent print culture shaped the poetic theory and practice of Huang Tingjian and the Jiangxi School of Poetry he founded. Author Yugen Wang argues that at the core of Huang and the Jiangxi School’s search for poetic methods was their desire to find a new way of reading and writing that could effectively address the changed literary landscape of the eleventh century. Wang chronicles the historical and cultural negotiation Huang and his colleagues were conducting as they responded to the new book culture, and opens new ground for investigating the literary interpretive and hermeneutical effects of printing. This book should be of interest not only to scholars and readers of classical Chinese poetry but to anyone concerned with how the material interacts with the intellectual and how technology has influenced our conception and practice of reading and writing throughout history.
THREE MILLENNIA OF CHINESE POETRY Anabela Fong Keng Seng
Revista brasileira de literatura comparada,
06/2024, Volume:
22, Issue:
41
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Poetry has a history of thousands of years in China and can be said to be the shining jewel in the crown of Chinese literature, occupying a major proportion in her history. Having originated from ...folk songs, the Chinese poetry has produced a large number of brilliant examples from the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC) to the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn) Period (770-476 BC). China has, since ancient times, maintained a tradition of education in poetry, which is used to educate the people and arouse their intelligence. Through the reading, studying and writing of poetry, it is possible to instruct and cultivate the character of young pupils, as well as to promote children’s creative thinking, logical dialectics and humanistic consciousness. In addition, reciting, learning and writing poetry has the ability to cultivate one’s temperament, allowing people of all social strata, professional occupation and age to cleanse and purify their minds. The realm of poetry has the same effect of calming the soul as religious belief. This article shows the highlights of three millennia of Chinese poetry to the readers or scholars whose native language is not Chinese.
The songs of the Royal Zhōu (“Zhōu Nán” 周南) and of the Royal Shào (“Shào Nán” 召南) have formed a conceptual unit since at least the late Spring and Autumn period (771–453 BC). With this book Meyer and ...Schwartz provide a first complete reading of their earliest, Warring States (453–221 BC), iteration as witnessed by the Ānhuī University manuscripts. As a thought experiment, the authors seek to establish an emic reading of these songs, which they contextualise in the larger framework of studies of the Shī (Songs) and of meaning production during the Warring States period more broadly. The analysis casts light on how the Songs were used by different groups during the Warring States period.
Heroines of Jiangyongis the first English translation of a set of verse narratives recorded in the unique women's script (nushu) of rural Jiangyong County, Hunan, in southern China. This selection of ...Chinese folk literature provides a rare window into the everyday life of rural daughters, wives, and mothers, as they transmit valuable lessons about surviving in a patriarchal society that is often harsh and unforgiving. Featuring strong female protagonists, the ballads deal with moral issues, dangers women face outside the family home, and the difficulties of childbirth.
The women's script, which represents units of sound in the local Chinese dialect, was discovered by scholars in the late twentieth century, creating a stir in China and abroad. This volume offers a full translation of all the longer ballads in women's script, providing an exceptional opportunity to observe which specific narratives appealed to rural women in traditional China. The translations are preceded by a brief introduction to women's script and its scholarship, and a discussion of each of the twelve selections.
No Moonlight in My Cup N. Rabinovitch, Judith; R. Bradstock, Timothy
01/2019, Volume:
10
eBook
No Moonlight in My Cup provides translations and commentaries for more than two hundred Sinitic poems (kanshi 漢詩) from the Nara and Heian courts (710-1185) together with a detailed introduction to ...this important but relatively little-studied literary genre.
The oral factor in Chinese literature, although critically important, has been largely neglected in the scholarship of the last generation. In this study, one of the leading specialists in classical ...Chinese literature introduces readers to a repertoire of seventy-seven songs and ballads of early imperial China. Each song-text is newly translated and fully annotated and explicated. Anne Birrell deals systematically with problems of the earliest sources, attribution, textual variants, meter, and structure. Her introductory essay provides a valuable sociohistorical context for this material. First published in 1988, this important study of the folk song has become standard reading for students of oral literature and Chinese folklore and popular culture.
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