Tian Yuan Tan's Books

Songs of Contentment and Transgression

Discharged Officials and Literati Communities in Sixteenth-Century North China

By: Tian Yuan Tan

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Songs of Contentment and Transgression

Discharged Officials and Literati Communities in Sixteenth-Century North China

By: Tian Yuan Tan

A discharged official in mid-Ming China faced significant changes in his life. This book explores three such officials in the sixteenth century—Wang Jiusi, Kang Hai, and Li Kaixian—who turned to literary endeavors when forced to retire. Instead of the formal writing expected of scholar-officials, however, they chose to engage in the stigmatized genre ofqu (songs), a collective term for drama and sanqu. As their efforts reveal, a disappointing end to an official career and a physical move away from the center led to their embrace of qu and the pursuit of a marginalized literary genre. This book also attempts to sketch the largely unknown literary landscape of mid-Ming north China. After their retirements, these three writers became cultural leaders in their native regions. Wang, Kang, and Li are studied here not as solitary writers but as central figures in the “qu communities” that formed around them. Using such communities as the basic unit in the study of qu allows us to see how sanqu and drama were produced, transmitted, and “used” among these writers, things less evident when we focus on the individual.

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Page Count

313

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684170591

ISBN 13

9781684170593

The Halberd at Red Cliff

Jian'an and the Three Kingdoms

By: Xiaofei Tian

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The Halberd at Red Cliff

Jian'an and the Three Kingdoms

By: Xiaofei Tian

The turn of the third century CE—known as the Jian’an era or Three Kingdoms period—holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and events have also inspired works of poetry, fiction, drama, film, and art throughout Chinese history, including Internet fantasy literature today. There is a vast body of secondary literature on these two subjects individually, but very little on their interface.The image of the Jian’an era, with its feasting, drinking, heroism, and literary panache, as well as intense male friendship, was to return time and again in the romanticized narrative of the Three Kingdoms. How did Jian’an bifurcate into two distinct nostalgias, one of which was the first paradigmatic embodiment of wen (literary graces, cultural patterning), and the other of wu (heroic martial virtue)? How did these largely segregated nostalgias negotiate with one another? And how is the predominantly male world of the Three Kingdoms appropriated by young women in contemporary China? The Halberd at Red Cliff investigates how these associations were closely related in their complex origins and then came to be divergent in their later metamorphoses.

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Page Count

472

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684170923

ISBN 13

9781684170920

Visionary Journeys

Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China

By: Xioafei Tian

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Visionary Journeys

Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China

By: Xioafei Tian

This book explores the parallel and yet profoundly different ways of seeing the outside world and engaging with the foreign at two important moments of dislocation in Chinese history, namely, the early medieval period commonly known as the Northern and Southern Dynasties (317–589 CE), and the nineteenth century. Xiaofei Tian juxtaposes literary, historical, and religious materials from these two periods in comparative study, bringing them together in their unprecedentedly large-scale interactions, and their intense fascination, with foreign cultures. By examining various cultural forms of representation from the two periods, Tian attempts to sort out modes of seeing the world that inform these writings. These modes, Tian argues, were established in early medieval times and resurfaced, in permutations and metamorphoses, in nineteenth-century writings on encountering the Other. This book is for readers who are interested not only in early medieval or nineteenth-century China but also in issues of representation, travel, visualization, and modernity.

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Page Count

401

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684170621

ISBN 13

9781684170623

Songs of Contentment and Transgression

Discharged Officials and Literati Communities in Sixteenth-Century North China

By: Tian Yuan Tan

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Songs of Contentment and Transgression

Discharged Officials and Literati Communities in Sixteenth-Century North China

By: Tian Yuan Tan

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

313

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684170591

ISBN 13

9781684170593

Book's by Tian Yuan Tan

Songs of Contentment and Transgression

Songs of Contentment and Transgression

The Halberd at Red Cliff

The Halberd at Red Cliff

Visionary Journeys

Visionary Journeys

Songs of Contentment and Transgression

Songs of Contentment and Transgression

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