Saying All That Can Be Said : The Art of Describing Sex in Jin Ping Mei /
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In Saying All That Can Be Said , Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as "just sex" or as "bad sex," he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel's way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei's language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture's cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in premodern China. See Less
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Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9780674291355
9781684176564
Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature /
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Canvasing a range of materials that include early tales of exemplarity, medieval song lyrics, Ming-Qing poetry and plucked rhymes, twentieth century writings about revolutionaries, opera stars, missionaries, and contemporary fiction, this volume illustrates the discourse and representation of friendship in which women gain agency and participate in broader arguments about ethics, politics, and religious transcendence. Friendship prompts reflections on gender roles, becomes the venue of literary self-consciousness, and heightens the sense of literary community. Gender and community function in new ways through the public dimension of friendship, and most importantly, the intersections of gender and friendship enable us to rethink other relationships.
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1 online resource (330 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004707634
Strange Tales from Edo : Rewriting Chinese Fiction in Early Modern Japan /
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In Strange Tales from Edo , William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan's engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600-1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record-the first of their kind-document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices-the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding-in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting-hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation-that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts. See Less
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Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9780674293809
9781684176878
Literary History in and beyond China : Reading Text and World /
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Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World explores the idea of literary history across the long span of the Chinese tradition. Although much scholarship on Chinese literature may be characterized as doing the work of literary history, there has been little theoretical engagement with received literary historical categories and assumptions, with how literary historical judgments are formed, and with what it means to do literary history in the first place. The present collection of essays addresses these questions from perspectives emerging both from within the tradition and from without, examining the anthological histories that shape the concept of a particular genre, the interpretive positions that impel our aesthetic judgments, the conceptual categories that determine how literary history is framed, and the history of literary historiography itself. As such, the essays collectively consider what it means to think through the framework of literary history, what literary history affords or omits, and what needs to be theorized in terms of literary history's constraints and possibilities. See Less
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Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9780674291270
9781684176786