The essays in Powerful Arguments reconstruct the standards of validity underlying argumentative practices in a wide array of late imperial Chinese discourses, from the Song through the Qing dynasties. The fourteen case studies analyze concrete arguments defended or contested in areas ranging from historiography, philosophy, law, and religion to natural studies, literature, and the civil examination system. By examining uses of evidence, habits of inference, and the criteria by which some arguments were judged to be more persuasive than others, the contributions recreate distinct cultures of...

In Dionysus on the Other Shore, Letizia Fusini argues that throughout his early exile years (late 1980s-1990s), Gao Xingjian gradually moved away from Absurdist Drama to develop a dramaturgical system with tragic characteristics. Drawing on a range of contemporary theories of tragedy, this book reconfigures some of the key tropes of Gao’s post-1987 theater as varied articulations of the Dionysian sparagmos mechanism. They are the dismemberment of the dramatic self, the usage of constricted spaces, the divisive nature of gender relations, and the agony of verbal language. Through a...

In The City of Ye in the Chinese Literary Landscape, Joanne Tsao demonstrates how the city of Ye changed from an iconic space that represented Cao Cao’s heroic enterprise to a symbol of the fruitlessness of human endeavour, and then finally to a literary landmark, a synecdoche for the vicissitudes of human life caught in the predictable cycles of dynastic rise and decline. Through a close reading of literary works on Ye, she illustrates how the city transformed from a lived to imaginative space to become a symbol in the poetic lexicon. Making use of literary and historical texts on Ye and...

Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China explores the relationships between the artist, local society, and artistic practice during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Arranged as an investigation of the artist Hua Yan’s work at a pivotal moment in eighteenth-century society, this book considers his paintings and poetry in early eighteenth-century Hangzhou, mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and finally their nineteenth-century afterlife in Shanghai. By investigating Hua Yan’s struggle as a marginalized artist—both at his time and in the canon of Chinese...

In Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body, Xing Wang investigates the intellectual and technical contexts in which the knowledge of physiognomy (xiangshu) was produced and transformed in Ming China (1368-1644 C.E.). Known as a fortune-telling technique via examining the human body and material objects, Xing Wang shows how the construction of the physiognomic body in many Ming texts represent a unique, unprecedented ‘somatic cosmology’. Applying an anthropological reading to these texts and providing detailed analysis of this technique, the author proves that this physiognomic...

In Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Modern Chinese Detective Fiction (1896–1949), Yan Wei historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. Wei identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction during the late Qing and the Republican periods. She further argues that these two...

Ritual Learning is a key driver in the cultural dominance of Confucianism. In early China, Confucian officials derive political influence from the sub-discipline of ritual. Imperial regimes establish legitimacy through their state religion, headed by sacrifices to ancestors and to deities of Heaven and Earth. Ritual Learning allows Confucian-educated officials to assert control over these cults, and reshape dynastic legitimacy according to their own design, claimed to derive from the sage kings of antiquity. Confucianism is not just a philosophical and intellectual tradition. Through its...

After piloting an emperor the age of a college student through China’s most drastic government reforms before the modern era, Wang Anshi retreated to his Halfway Hill villa at Nanjing, where in late middle age he became one of the Northern Song dynasty’s three or four most innovative poets. He redirected the craft of composing high-stakes policy papers into lighter-than-air evocations of clear-eyed grief, sensuous Buddhism, and intricate reactions to rain on the river or donkey-riding up Bell Mountain. Acrimony over his redesigned government, which he lived just long enough to see...

This first ethnography of the Hmong in China is based on Nicholas Tapp’s extensive fieldwork in a Hmong village in Sichuan. Basing his analysis on the concepts of context and agency, Tapp discusses the “paradoxical ambivalence at the heart of Hmong culture.” A paradox arises in the historical and ethnographic construction of the identity of the Hmong by conscious contrast with, and in opposition to, a majority Han Chinese identity at the same time that large parts of Hmong culture are shared with the Chinese and may be the results of historical processes of adoption, absorption,...