Late-Antique Studies in Memory of Alan Cameron /
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The classicist and historian Alan Cameron (1938-2017) was, among other achievements, one of the scholars who most contributed to the refoundation of late-antique studies. In this tribute W. V. Harris and Anne Hunnell Chen have brought together fourteen contributions that cover a broad range of historical, literary, and art-historical topics, running from the first century AD to the ninth. Some contributions concern Cameron's own favourite themes (the Greek Anthology, the Historia Augusta , circus factions, the transmission of texts), while others seek to assess his work and its impact. Other papers branch out from his concerns to discuss slavery, simony, and hospitals. Fourth- and fifth-century writers are often to the fore and the volume includes a new text by the poet Dioscoros of Aphrodite.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004452794
9789004449367
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