Cynthia J. Brokaw's Books

Commerce in Culture

The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods

By: Cynthia J. Brokaw

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Commerce in Culture

The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods

By: Cynthia J. Brokaw

Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals. It is precisely the ordinariness of Sibao imprints that make them valuable for the study of commercial publishing, the text-production process, and the geographical and social expansion of book culture in Chinese society. In a study with important implications for cultural and economic history, Cynthia Brokaw describes rural, lower-level publishing and bookselling operations at the end of the imperial period. Commerce in Culture traces how the poverty and isolation of Sibao necessitated a bare-bones approach to publishing and bookselling and how the Hakka identity of the Sibao publishers shaped the configuration of their distribution networks and even the nature of their publications. Sibao’s industry reveals two major trends in print culture: the geographical extension of commercial woodblock publishing to hinterlands previously untouched by commercial book culture and the related social penetration of texts to lower-status levels of the population.

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Page Count

699

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684174503

ISBN 13

9781684174508

The History of the Book in East Asia

By: Cynthia Brokaw

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The History of the Book in East Asia

By: Cynthia Brokaw

The history of the book in East Asia is closely linked to problems of language and script, problems which have also had a profound impact on the technology of printing and on the social and intellectual impact of print in this area. This volume contains key readings on the history of printed books and manuscripts in China, Korea and Japan and includes an introduction which provides an overview of the history of the book in East Asia and sets the readings in their context.

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Page Count

419

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

135188834X

ISBN 13

9781351888349

The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit

Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China

By: Cynthia Joanne Brokaw

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The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit

Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China

By: Cynthia Joanne Brokaw

The ledgers of merit and demerit were a type of morality book that achieved sudden and widespread popularity in China during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consisting of lists of good and bad deeds, each assigned a certain number of merit or demerit points, the ledgers offered the hope of divine reward to users "good" enough to accumulate a substantial sum of merits. By examining the uses of the ledgers during the late Ming and early Qing periods, Cynthia Brokaw throws new light on the intellectual and social history of the late imperial era. The ledgers originally functioned as guides to salvation for twelfth-century Taoists and Buddhists, but Brokaw shows how the literati of turbulent sixteenth-century China began to use them as aids in the struggle for official status through civil service examinations. The author describes how the responses of some Confucian thinkers to the popularity of the ledgers not only refined the orthodox Neo-Confucian method of self-cultivation but also revealed the serious ambiguity of the classic Confucian understanding of the relationship between fate and human action. Finally, she demonstrates that by the end of the seventeenth century the ledgers were used not so much to facilitate upward mobility as to promote social stability by prescribing standards that encouraged people to keep to their social places. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Page Count

300

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400861942

ISBN 13

9781400861941

Book's by Cynthia J. Brokaw

Commerce in Culture

Commerce in Culture

The History of the Book in East Asia

The History of the Book in East Asia

The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit

The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit

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