New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society – serie

This volume develops new strategies for reading, contextualizing, and interpreting the long Chinese tradition of women's biography. Drawing upon a vast array of sources - from formal biography to poetry, letters, and oral interviews - the authors examine how women's biography served particular cultural, political, and world-making projects, and how it illuminates these projects in new ways by highlighting tensions within and between them.

In 221 BCE the state of Qin vanquished its rivals and established the first empire on Chinese soil, starting a millennium-long imperial age in Chinese history. Hailed by some and maligned by many, Qin has long been an enigma. In this pathbreaking study, the authors integrate textual sources with newly available archeological and paleographic materials, providing a boldly novel picture of Qin's cultural and political trajectory, its evolving institutions and its religion, its place in China's history, and the reasons for its success and for its ultimate collapse.

Constituting over ninety percent of China's population, Han is not only the largest ethnonational group in that country but also one of the largest categories of human identity in world history. In this pathbreaking volume, a multidisciplinary group of scholars examine this ambiguous identity, one that shares features with, but cannot be subsumed under, existing notions of ethnicity, culture, race, nationality, and civilization.

Gossip and anecdote may be "idle talk," but they also serve to knit together individuals in society and to provide the materials through which literary culture and historical memory are constructed. This groundbreaking book provides a cultural history of gossip and anecdote in traditional China, beginning with the Han dynasty and ending with the Qing. The ten essays, along with the introduction and postface, address the verification, transmission, and interpretation of gossip and anecdote across literary and historical genres. Contributors: Sarah M. Allen, Beverly J. Bossler, Jack W. Chen, Ronald Egan, Dore J. Levy, Stephen Owen, Graham Sanders, David Schaberg, Anna M. Shields, Richard E. Strassberg, and, Xiaofei Tian.

The modern histories of China and Japan are inexorably intertwined. Their relationship is perhaps most obvious in the fields of political, economic, and military history, but it is no less true in cultural and art history. Yet the traffic in artistic practices and practitioners between China and Japan remains an understudied field. In this volume, an international group of scholars investigates Japan's impact on Chinese art from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s. Individual essays address a range of perspectives, including the work of individual Chinese and Japanese painters, calligraphers, and sculptors, as well as artistic associations, international exhibitions, the collotype production or artwork, and the emergence of a modern canon.