The British opium trade along China's seacoast has come to symbolize China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narrative, opium is the primary medium through which China encountered the economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Opium, however, was not a Sino-British problem confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, an empire-wide crisis, and its spread among an ethnically diverse populace created regionally and culturally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.
This book examines the crisis from the perspective...
The British opium trade along China's seacoast has come to symbolize China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard hi...
This book examines the development of Japanese literature depicting the native place ("furusato") from the mid-Meiji period through the late 1930s as a way of articulating the uprootedness and sense of loss many experienced as Japan modernized. The 1890s witnessed the appearance of fictional works describing a city dweller who returns to his native place, where he reflects on the evils of urban life and the idyllic past of his childhood home. The book concentrates on four authors who typify this trend: Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki T'son, Sat' Haruo, and Shiga Naoya.
All four writers may be...
This book examines the development of Japanese literature depicting the native place ("furusato") from the mid-Meiji period through the late 1930s as...
Mount Tai in northeastern China has long been a sacred site. Indeed, it epitomizes China's religious and social diversity. Throughout history, it has been a magnet for both women and men from all classes--emperors, aristocrats, officials, literati, and villagers. For much of the past millennium, however, the vast majority of pilgrims were illiterate peasants who came to pray for their deceased ancestors, as well as for sons, good fortune, and health.
Each of these social groups approached Mount Tai with different expectations. Each group's or individual's view of the world, interpersonal...
Mount Tai in northeastern China has long been a sacred site. Indeed, it epitomizes China's religious and social diversity. Throughout history, it has...
If the postmodernist ethical onslaught has led to the demise of literature by exposing its political agenda, if all literature is compromised by its entanglement with power, why does literature's subterranean voice still seduce us into reading? Why do the madness and the scandal of transgressive literature, its power to force us to begin anew, its evil, escape the gaze of contemporary literary criticism? Why do we dare not reject ethics and the ethical approach to literature? If the primary task of literary criticism is to correct others' ethical missteps, should we not begin by confronting...
If the postmodernist ethical onslaught has led to the demise of literature by exposing its political agenda, if all literature is compromised by its ...
Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the conceptualization of selfhood among adolescents in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. The author explores how the idol-manufacturing industry absorbs young people into its system of...
Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and pr...
This book documents an Islamic-Confucian school of scholarship that flourished, mostly in the Yangzi Delta, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on previously unstudied materials, it reconstructs the network of Muslim scholars responsible for the creation and circulation of a large corpus of Chinese Islamic written material--the so-called Han Kitab. Against the backdrop of the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty, The Dao of Muhammad shows how the creation of this corpus, and of the scholarly network that supported it, arose in a context of intense dialogue between Muslim...
This book documents an Islamic-Confucian school of scholarship that flourished, mostly in the Yangzi Delta, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuri...
The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. How do interpretive structures develop and disintegrate? What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge?
This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals...
The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the...
In the past quarter-century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars, and gender analysis has suggested important revisions of the master narratives of national histories the dominant, often celebratory tales of the successes of a nation and its leaders. Although modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of Japan have begun to embrace gender as an analytic category.
The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and...
In the past quarter-century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars, and gender analysis has suggested i...
