In Crossing the Gate, Man Xu examines the lives of women in the Chinese province of Fujian during the Song dynasty. Tracking women's life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the ...domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining women's own agency in gender construction. She argues that women's autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song women's life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called "Song-Yuan-Ming transition" from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.
The occupation of the northern half of the Chinese territories in the 1120s brought about a transformation in political communication in the south that had lasting implications for imperial Chinese ...history. By the late eleventh century, the Song court no longer dominated the production of information about itself and its territories. Song literati gradually consolidated their position as producers, users, and discussants of court gazettes, official records, archival compilations, dynastic histories, military geographies, and maps. This development altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the imperial period. Based on a close reading of reader responses to official records and derivatives and on a mapping of literati networks, the author further proposes that the twelfth-century geopolitical crisis resulted in a lasting literati preference for imperial restoration and unified rule. Hilde De Weerdt makes an important intervention in cultural and intellectual history by examining censorship and publicity together. In addition, she reorients the debate about the social transformation and local turn of imperial Chinese elites by treating the formation of localist strategies and empire-focused political identities as parallel rather than opposite trends.
Approaching writing as a form of cultural practice and understanding text as an historical object, this book not only recovers elements of the ritual practice of Middle-Period weddings, but also ...reassesses the relationship between texts and the Middle-Period past. Its fourfold narrative of the writing of weddings and its spirited engagement with the texts—ritual manuals, engagement letters, nuptial songs, calendars and almanacs, and legal texts—offer a form and style for a cultural history that accommodates the particularities of the sources of the Chinese imperial past.
Winner of the 2020 Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize. In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard examines the writing of interiority in paintings of women, considering ...correspondences to examples of erotic poetry and how such works address the concerns of artists, patrons, and viewers.
Senses of the City Lam, Joseph S. C; Lin, Shuenfu; de Pee, Christian ...
03/2017
eBook
From its first designation as temporary capital in 1138, the city of Hangzhou (then called Lin’an) was deemed representative of the diminished empire of the Song (960–1279), in all its contradictory ...aspects. The exquisite beauty of the city confirmed its destiny to become an imperial residence, but it also portended its fatal corruption. The wealth and ease of Hangzhou epitomized the vigor of the southern empire as well as its oblivious decadence. The city was paramount and feeble, aweinspiring and threatened, the most admired city in the civilized world and a disgrace to the dynastic founders. Rather than perpetuating the debate about the merit of these polemical judgments, the contributors of Senses of the City treat them as expressions of their historical moment, revealing of ideological conviction or aesthetic preference, rather than of historical truth. By reading the sources as expressions of individual experience and political conviction, the contributors defy the impassioned rhetoric of past generations in order to recover the solid ground of historical evidence. Leading scholars of the field, including Beverly Bossler, Stephen West, and Martin Powers have produced essays that relate changes in literary convention to shifts in territorial boundaries, and analyze writing, painting, dance, and music as means by which individual literati placed themselves in time and space. The contributors reestablish the historical connections between writing and meaningful action, between text and world, between the sources and their own words, and between the page and the senses. Their efforts to retrieve the sounds, sights, and smells of Hangzhou from Southern Song texts replicate, in reverse direction, the attempts of twelfth and thirteenthcentury authors to devise effective tropes and suitable genres that would preserve their living impressions of the city in writing.
Drawn from Chinese classics of history, Hung Hing Ming's biographies introduce China's most emblematic historical figures and the cultural attributes fostered by China's ancient chronicles. This book ...is about one of the greatest emperors in Chinese history, Zhao Kuang Yin,founder of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). He is honored for having unified China in the extremely chaotic period of 'Five Dynasties and Ten States'.
This is a study of war between Sung China and Kitan Liao, the treaty at Shan-yüan in 1005 that ended it, and the forms and textures of peaceful diplomatic contact between the two states that ...prevailed for the rest of the eleventh century.
The author begins with a biography exploring the moral and aesthetic implications of Wu's life as a guest-poet" patronized by officials and aristocrats, and continues with a reconstruction of the ...historical and literary context needed for modern readers to grasp his poetic techniques.
Originally published in 1987.
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