Synopses & Reviews
Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China's literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.
Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text's meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.
About the Author
Judith T. Zeitlinis Professor of Chinese Literature, <>University of Chicago.Lydia H. Liuis Helmut F. Stern Professor of Chinese Studies, <>University of Michigan.Ellen Widmeris Professor of Chinese Literature at <>Wesleyan University.Rania Huntingtonis Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, <>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Kathryn Lowryis Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the <>University of California, Santa Barbara.Shang Weiis Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at <>Columbia University.Emma J. Tengis Professor of Chinese Studies at the <>Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Sophie Volppis Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the <>University of California, Berkeley.Eugene Y. Wangis Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at <>Harvard University.Ellen Widmeris Professor of Chinese Literature at <>Wesleyan University.Wu Hungis Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the <>University of Chicago.Catherine Vance Yehis a Research Associate at the Insitute of Chinese Studies, <>Heidelberg University.
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Ellen Widmer Contributors
Introduction
Lydia H. Liu and Judith T. Zeitlin
Part I: The Circulation of Writing
On Rubbings: Their Materiality and Historicity
Wu Hung
Disappearing Verses: Writing on Walls and Anxieties of Loss
Judith T. Zeitlin
The Literary Consumption of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China
Sophie Volpp
Part II: Print Culture and Networks of Reading
Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture
Shang Wei
Duplicating the Strength of Feeling: The Circulation of Qingshu in the Late Ming
Kathryn Lowry
Considering a Coincidence: The "Female Reading Public" Circa 1828
Ellen Widmer
Part III: The Late Qing Periodical Press: New Images, New Fiction
The New Novel Before the New Novel: John Fryer's Fiction Contest
Anonymous
The Weird in the Newspaper
Rania Huntington
Creating the Urban Beauty: The Shanghai Courtesan in Late Qing Illustrations
Catherine Vance Yeh
Part IV: Ethnography, Media, and Ideology
Texts on the Right and Pictures on the Left: Reading the Qing Record of Frontier Taiwan
Emma J. Teng
Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the Discourse of the Demonic
Eugene Y. Wang
A Folksong Immortal and Official Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century China
Lydia H. Liu
Reference Matter
Index