In this first truly cross-cultural study of opium, Keith McMahon considers the perspectives of both smokers and non-smokers from China and the Euro-West and from both sides of the issue of opium prohibition. The author stages a dramatic confrontation between the Chinese opium user and the Euro-Westerner who saw in opium the image of an uncanny Asiatic menace. Opium was inextricably bound up with generalizations made about teeming Asiatic masses, nightmarish opium sots, effeminate Chinamen, and orientalized white women. In China, opium--called the Western Drug--was tied to the arrival of...
In this first truly cross-cultural study of opium, Keith McMahon considers the perspectives of both smokers and non-smokers from China and the Euro-We...
For centuries of Chinese history, polygamy and prostitution were closely linked practices that legitimized the polygynous male, the man with multiple sexual partners. Despite their strict hierarchies, these practices also addressed fundamental antagonisms in sexual relations in serious and constructive ways. Qing fiction abounds in stories of female resistance and superiority. Women--main wives, concubines, and prostitutes--were adept at exerting control and gaining status for themselves, while men indulged in elaborate fantasies about female power. In Polygamy and Sublime Passion, Keith...
For centuries of Chinese history, polygamy and prostitution were closely linked practices that legitimized the polygynous male, the man with multip...
Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China. In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red...
Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive r...
This volume completes McMahon's acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of empresses and imperial concubines as mere victims or playthings, this book considers them as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor's relations with others.
This volume completes McMahon's acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of empresses and imperial con...
