Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond

Description

This volume addresses cultural and literary transformation in the late Ming (1550-1644) and late Qing (1851-1911) eras. Although conventionally associated with a devastating sociopolitical crisis, each of these periods was also a time when Chinese culture was rejuvenated. Focusing on the twin themes of crisis and innovation, the seventeen chapters in this book aim to illuminate the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; to analyze linkages between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and to rethink the premodernity of the late Ming and late Qing in the context of the end of the age of modernism. The chapters touch on a remarkably wide spectrum of works, some never before discussed in English, such as poetry, drama, full-length novels, short stories, tanci narratives, newspaper articles, miscellanies, sketches, familiar essays, and public and private historical accounts. More important, they intersect on issues ranging from testimony about dynastic decline to the negotiation of authorial subjectivity, from the introduction of cultural technology to the renewal of literary convention. Front Matter Contents Introduction Part I Texts, Tutors, and Fathers The Making of the Everyday World Women as Emblems of Dynastic Fall in Qing Literature The Return of the Palace Lady The Daughter's Vision of National Crisis Part II Ethics of Form Jinghua yuan Part III The Coin of Gender in Pinhua baojian The Fall of the God of Money The Newspaper, zhiguai, and the Sorcery Epidemic of 1876 A New Mode of Literary Production in the Late Qing The Narrator's Voice Before the "Fiction Revolution" Part IV Creating Subjectivity in Wu Jianren's The Sea of Regret The Subject of Pain Women's Poetic Witnessing Conclusions Second Haunting Index