Search

The essays printed here all make the case for historical criticism in reasonable and persuasive terms. Professor Weinbrot's paper shows how recovering the meaning that classical allusions, formal word order, and particular loaded phrases had for their original audiences makes us better readers of eighteenth-century novels. One of his examples is the phrase “dispensing power,” which James II claimed in his attempt to remake the monarchy on an autocratic model, and which Samuel Richardson used in a different context while describing Pamela in her “exalted condition.” Further research shows that controversial pamphlets contemporaneous with Richardson's novel discussed the refusal of Quakers to pay tithes by using the same phrase, an intriguing circumstance as Pamela attends a masquerade dressed as a Quaker. Professor Hume's paper details how little we know about many aspects of dramatic history, and rightly criticizes sweeping claims based on sparse data. Although we shall always wrestle with inadequate data, our readers still expect us to speculate, and as long as we do so honestly, labeling our guesses as guesses, what we do is at worst harmless and at best suggestive. If some factual discoveries decisively invalidate earlier readings, others enrich our sense of context while leaving room for different interpretations. Professor Ezell, who describes herself as “quite happy with the constructions of databases and counting things,” correctly rejects the preposterous and increasingly widespread belief that “close reading is … totally inappropriate as a method of studying literary history.” We need to nurture and celebrate scholars who understand the importance of historical evidence, even when that evidence is incomplete, and who also understand the subtleties of rhetorical, cultural, and aesthetic interpretation that remain well beyond the reach of any existing computer program.

Through the examination of a select body of classical-style poems that are inscribed on or written about photographs of the self in the modern era, this article delves into the intertwined issues of the self, affect, and autobiographical writing. It first explores the ethical implications of “poems on photographs of the self” (ziti xiaozhao 自題小照) and the issue of temporality involved in the confrontation with a self-image and subsequent writing about the image. Second, it focuses on the issue of the self as other, as well as fractures and the instability of modern subjectivity as amplified in visual self-encounters. In so doing, the article attempts to offer a new understanding of the self/image and text/image dynamic, with insight into the cultural and affective articulations of the self in the context of a new visual culture in modern China.

Thompson’s essay intervenes in conversations about mid-nineteenth-century authorship and print culture by distinguishing between the economy of paper and the economy of print. He argues that critical treatments of Melville’s work, and particularly “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), have not adequately attended to the material economy of paper that existed for Melville before the cycle of literary publication, distribution, and circulation began. Living in the important papermaking region of rural west Massachusetts allowed Melville to experience the raw materials of that economic sector not as a distant or vicarious consumer but, following his visit to the Old Berkshire Mill in Dalton in the winter of 1851, as a specialized purchaser. Instead of treating paper as a metonym of literary-market exchange, then, Thompson’s essay examines Melville’s experience and imagining of this raw material—literally avant la lettre—as a way of better understanding the economy of a substance whose manufactured sizes (folio, octavo, and duodecimo) he had already used to classify whales in Moby-Dick and on which his recalcitrant copyist, Bartleby, refuses to write.

Crumpled Paper Boat is a book of experimental ventures in ethnographic writing, an exploration of the possibilities of a literary anthropology. These original essays from notable writers in the field blur the boundaries between ethnography and genres such as poetry, fiction, memoir, and cinema. They address topics as diverse as ritual expression in Cuba and madness in a Moroccan city, the HIV epidemic in South Africa and roadkill in suburban America. Essays alternate with methodological reflections on fundamental problems of writerly heritage, craft, and responsibility in anthropology. Crumpled Paper Boat engages writing as a creative process of encounter, a way of making and unmaking worlds, and a material practice no less participatory and dynamic than fieldwork itself. These talented writers show how inventive, appealing, and intellectually adventurous prose can allow us to enter more profoundly into the lives and worlds of others, breaking with conventional notions of representation and subjectivity. They argue that such experimentation is essential to anthropology’s role in the contemporary world, and one of our most powerful means of engaging it. Contributors. Daniella Gandolfo, Angela Garcia, Tobias Hecht, Michael Jackson, Adrie Kusserow, Stuart McLean, Todd Ramon Ochoa, Anand Pandian, Stefania Pandolfo, Lisa Stevenson, Kathleen Stewart

An almost archetypal scene in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, a novel set in Igbo land in 1922 when British colonization and Christian evangelization were first penetrating every level of Igbo society, features a mother and three children gath ered in her house in her husband's compound after dinner. Half in darkness, two of the children, a boy and a girl, listen to their mother tell a story. Sitting apart from them, directly beside the palm-oil taper that is the single source of light, is the oldest brother, absorbed in his new school reader, the very first book ever to enter the compound. The scene reinforces a familiar contrast between two experiences of verbal culture: the storytelling mother and her listeners sit in a "close group near the cooking place," enjoying a communion that complements the completed communal acts of preparing and eating food, while Oduche "sat apart near the entrance to the one sleeping room" (191). His reading opens a door to a separate, interior world, which, like that of sleep and dream, each person enters alone. Critical discussion of African literature and of Achebe's fiction in particular commonly values orality as the bearer of vernacular tradition and the cultural expression of the unschooled majority, and therefore the sign of a general African ness. The demand for cultural authenticity by African and non-African readers alike has sometimes led us to forget the deep personal experience African writ ers have of books and that all African novels are written texts. Recently, how ever, important work by Stephanie Newell, Karin Barber, and Derek Peterson has emphasized the impact that literacy has had on consciousness and creativity in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. African writers all know the feel of paper when it is new and after it has been exposed to humidity, the touch and the sound of a typewriter, and the dissociation that comes with seeing their names on the cover of a book. These experiences cannot but leave a mark on the texts that Africans write. Achebe's Nigerian readers, even today, are likely to have read books in circumstances similar to Oduche's: they, too, will have had to seek a pri vate retreat in the midst of family and will know what it is to read by the flicker of candlelight. Once we look for it, we find literacy everywhere in Arrow of God, even where it does not appear literally, that is, on the level of the story. In particular, the experience of reading and writing informs three different kinds of narrative space integral to the novel: the container so confining as to be suffocating; the straight line that cleaves through something closed; and the small room with a single occupant whose receptiveness to a disembodied voice is disturbed by other voices from outside.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is professor of English at Temple University. Her most recent books in criticism and poetry are Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (2001) and Drafts 1-38, Toll (2001). In 2002 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for poetry, and she was named the third recipient of the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Award for lifetime contributions to American poetry as a poet-scholar.

PART I: SETTING THE STAGE Acting Like a Woman Modern Formations of Gender and Performance PART II: KAWAKAMI SADAYAKKO Wifeing the Woman Straightening the Theater Reproducing the Empire PART III: MATSUI SUMAKO A New Woman A New Theater Feminists and Femmes Fatales Epilogue: Revealing the Real Body

This collection of essays is a comprehensive study of the ""father-daughter dynamic"" in Japanese female literary experience. Its contributors examine the ways in which women have been placed politically, ideologically, and symbolically as ""daughters"" in a culture that venerates ""the father"". They weigh the impact that this daughterly position has had on both the performance and production of women's writing from the classical period to the present. Conjoining the classical and the modern with a unified theme reveals an important continuum in female authorship-a historical approach often ignored by scholars. The essays devoted to the literature of the classical period discuss canonical texts in a new light, offering important feminist readings that challenge existing scholarship, while those dedicated to modern writers introduce readers to little-known texts with translations and readings that are engaging and original.

The essays in this volume present analyses of a wide variety of modern and pre-modern South Asian narratives in Bengali, Hindi, Panjabi, Tamil, and Urdu, including Hir Varis Shah Krittibasa's "Ramayana", Ruswa's "Umrao Jan Ada", and Phalke's film venture "Raja Harischandra", as well as texts less widely known, though equally significant. A wide range of analytical methods are applied.

Introduction: engaging Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies Yingjin Zhang Part I. Discipline, Discourse, Canon: 1. The challenge of East-West comparative literature Zhang Longxi 2. The utopias of discourse: on the impossibility of Chinese comparative literature David Palumbo-Liu 3. Canon formation in traditional Chinese poetry: Chinese canons, sacred and profane Mark E. Francis Part II. Gender, Sexuality, Body: 4. A feminist re-vision of Xu Wei's Ci Mulan and N&#252 zhuangyuan Ann-Marie Hsiung 5. Gender, subjectivity, sexuality: defining a subversive discourse in Wang Anyi's four tales of sexual transgression Helen H. Chen 6. Consuming Asian women: the fluid body of Josie Packard in Twin Peaks Greta Ai-Yu Niu Part III. Science, Modernity, Aesthetics: 7. Travel and translation: an aspect of china's cultural modernity, 1862-1926 John Yu Zou 8. Baoyu in Wonderland: technological Utopia in the early modern Chinese science fiction novel Feng-Ying Ming 9. The texture of the metropolis: modernist inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s Yingjin Zhang 10. The cult of poetry in contemporary China Michelle Yeh 11. Tianya, the ends of the world or the edge of heaven: comparative literature at the fin de siecle Eugene Chen Eoyang.

Details what one of this century's most forward-looking global thinkers foresaw with startling accuracy, including the explosion of worldwide nationalism and ethnic conflict.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Editors' Introduction Guide for Students and Teachers 1. Biography of the Daoist Saint Wang Fengxian by Du Guangting (850 - 933) Translated by Suzanne Cahill This biography of an important Daoist female saint of the mid-ninth century chronicles her life from childhood through her spiritual self-cultivation, culminating in her ascension to heaven. 2. Biography of the Great Compassionate One of Xiangshan by Jiang Zhiqi (1031 - 1104) Translated by Chun-fang Yu The earliest documentary evidence of the legend of Miaoshan, this stone inscription shows how the local story of a Chinese princess became identified with a universal Buddhist deity, the Bodhisattva Guanyin. 3. The Book of Filial Piety for Women Attributed to a Woman Nee Zheng (ca. 730) Translated by Patricia Buckley Ebrey The excerpt from this classic appears opposite corresponding passages from the original Book of Filial Piety to highlight the differences gender makes in the text and its messages. 4. Funerary Writings by Chen Liang (1143-1194) Translated by Beverly Bossler These three funerary odes describe how the funeral tablets of Chen Liang's mother's family came to be in his care, how his mother and her sister decided to marry their children together, and how his sister sustained her natal household during a period of family calamity. Along with the commemorative biography that follows, they open important windows on domestic life and family values during the period following the fall of the Northern Song. 5. "The Customs of Various Barbarians" by Li Jing (1251 - ?) Translated by Jacqueline M. Armijo-Hussein This description of minority peoples from a Yuan dynasty official's record of his experiences in Yunnan province illustrates how views of gender relations and especially sexual practices served as a measure of the level of civilization among non-Han populations. 6. Selected Writings by Luo Rufang (1515 - 1588) Translated by Yu-Yin Cheng In these writings scholar and philosopher Luo Rufang celebrates women who pursue intellectual and philosophical interests. He also champions the virtue of motherly nurturance and love, which he considered as important as the central Confucian virtues of filial piety and brotherly respect. 7. Final Instructions by Yang Jisheng (1516 - 1555) Translated by Beverly Bossler Composed in prison, these notes instruct Yang's wife and sons how to get along without him. His foremost concerns are three: that his family not become the subject of ridicule, that his sons get along with one another, and that his wife--who had already proven herself the moral conscience of the family--not commit suicide. 8. "Record of Past Karma" by Ji Xian (1614 - 1683) Translated by Grace S. Fong This autobiographical essay by the woman poet Ji Xian , with its powerful descriptions of dreams, visions, and personal illness, is unusually self-revelatory of the tensions between her personal religious desires and her obligations to her family. 9. "Letter to My Sons" by Gu Ruopu (1592 - ca.1681) Translated by Dorothy Ko Having seen to it that both sons married capable and learned wives, Hangzhou poet Gu Ruopu, virtuous widow and matriarch of the Huang family, decided to divide the family property and establish separate households for them. In this letter Gu outlines her support for the Confucian ideal of familism, but admonishes her sons to recognize women's indispensable roles in the male-centered kinship system. 10. Personal Letters in Seventeenth-Century Epistolary Guides Translated by Kathryn Lowry The large number of epistolary guides and collected letters published in the late Ming include models for letters to family members as well as a few examples of love letters and provide a unique view of the social universe of that period. The love letters translated here show how this genre can be read as a sort of epistolary fiction and raise questions about how people might have consulted letter-writing manuals for reasons beyond social etiquette. 11. Letters by Women of the Ming-Qing Period Translated by Yu-Yin Cheng These short letters, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reveal the erudition and wit as well as the spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities of highly educated upper-class women. 12. Selected Short Works by Wang Duanshu (1621 - after 1701) Translated by Ellen Widmer These short selections from the works of one of the earliest anthologists of women's writings display the extraordinary range and breadth of her learning, while revealing her personal, aesthetic, and scholarly sensibilities. 13. Two Ghost Stories from Liaozhai's Records of the Strange by Pu Songling (1640 - 1715) Translated by Judith T. Zeitlin The ghost story, authored by men and narrated from the male point of view, is one of the privileged spaces in Chinese literature for exploring fantasies of gender and sexuality. Such tales often involve a passionate affair between a young scholar and a beautiful female ghost who possesses a surprising degree of corporeality. The two late imperial tales translated here share two related themes: the power of love to triumph over death and the cosmic power of male generativity. 14. Two Biographies by Zhang Xuecheng (1738 - 1801) Translated by Susan Mann These biographies by one of the most distinguished scholars of the Qing period breathe life into views of women that are sometimes dismissed as mere conventions or stereotypes. In both texts we see, through men's eyes, how women took responsibility for setting the standards to measure and criticize men's behavior. 15. Poems on Tea-Picking Translated by Weijing Lu These poems about women at work, written mostly by men and spanning the dynasties from Tang through Qing, display the varied meanings of women's work in the poetic imagery of elite writers and point to the ways in which women as literary subjects supplied a ceaseless range of possibilities for inventive poets over time. The poems also show the subtle relationship between poetry as social criticism and poetry as aesthetic performance in the culture of the late imperial elite. 16. Drinking Wine and Reading "Encountering Sorrow": A Reflection in Disguise by Wu Zao (1799 - 1862) Translated by Sophie Volpp In this dramatic tableau the playwright casts herself as the sole speaker. She poses before a portrait of herself cross-dressed as a male scholar and sings to the portrait a sequence of lyrics describing her frustrations as a woman of talent. The text concludes that none but her cross-dressed self-image is a match for the writer herself. Hangzhou poet and official Chen Wenshu, a noted patron of female writers, wrote a collection of poems celebrating this work. 17. A Brief Record of the Eastern Ocean by Ding Shaoyi (fl. 1847) Translated by Emma Jinhua Teng During his eight-month stay in Taiwan in 1847 Ding Shaoyi wrote the Brief Record, which treats sixteen topics, among them: taxes, schools, coastal defense, local products, "savage" villages, "savage" customs, and marvels. When he returned to Taiwan in 1871 he appended new material to each item in his original account. The passage translated here is Ding's 1871 supplement to his original entry titled "Savage Customs." 18. The "Eating Crabs" Youth Book Translated by Mark C. Elliott This anonymous bilingual text, in Manchu and Chinese, reflects the complex ethnic picture in late imperial China, particularly in and around Beijing. Youth books were a form of oral performance very popular in the Qing capital. In this particular one, the story is told of a hapless Manchu bannerman and his shrewish Han Chinese wife who run afoul of a pot of feisty crabs. Glossaries and References Contributors Index

This vibrant collection presents 145 brief Bengali lyric poems dedicated to the Hindu goddesses Kali and Uma. These poems - many of which are presented here for the first time in English translation - were written from the early eighteenth century up to the contemporary period. They represent the unique Bengali tradition of goddess worship (Saktism) as it developed over this period. Included are forty poems by the most famous of all Sakta poets, Ramprasad Sen (c.1718-1775) and ten lyrics by the renowned 20th-century poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. McDermott's lucid introduction places these works in their historical context and shows how images of the goddesses evolved over the centuries. Her lively translations of these poetic lyrics evoke the passion and devotion of the followers of Kali and Uma and shed light on the history and practice of goddess worship.

List of Maps, Illustrations, and Musical Examples Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. The Development of Local-Classical Music 3. The 1960s to the Present: Efflorescence and Decline 4. Tradition, Innovation, and Identity in Tan-Singing Aesthetics 5. Style and Subgenre in Tan-Singing 6. The Chutney Phenomenon 7. Conclusion: Music and the Dynamics of a Diaspora Glossary Selections of the Compact Disc Selected Hindi Songs in Devnagari Script Notes Bibliography Discography of Local-Classical Music Index

INCLUDES BOOK BY BOOK SUMMARY OF THE PRINCIPAL EPISODE OF THE MAHABHARATA, NOTE ON THE SANSKIRT TEXT, NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF SANSKRIT WORDS AND A NOTE ON PROPER NAMES AND EPITHETS

The Lives of the Jain Elders is the standard synthesis of source material for the early history of Jainism by the great twelfth-century Jain scholar-monk, Hemacandra, also a key figure in the wider context of Sanskrit literature. An epic poem written in an allusive and ornamental style, it relates the pupillary succession of the early monastic Jain community, their teaching and the legendary spread of their influence, the ascetisicism of the Elders, and their eventual liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. Abounding in memorable characters, and providing a rich compendium of Indian folk-tale, The Lives of the Jain Elders offers fascinating insight into the social life of medieval India. This new translation makes the complete work available for the first time in a European language and is complemented by a full introduction illuminating Jain belief and history.

These 115 poems introduce readers in English to Sultan Bahu (d. 1691), a Sufi mystical poet who continues to be one of the most beloved writers in Punjabi. Bahu, whose name translates as "With God", remains highly popular in Pakistan and India today - even illiterate Punjabis can recite his poetry by heart.

"A Poem at the Right Moment" collects, and preserves, poemscalled "catus"that have circulated orally for centuries in South India. The poems are remarkable for their wit and precision, their lyrical insight on the commonplace, their fascination with sensual experience, and their exploration of the connection between language and desire. Taken together the "catus" offer a penetrating critical vision and an understanding of the classical traditions of Telugu, Tamil, and Sanskrit. Each poem is presented in a contemporary English translation along with the Indian-language original. An introduction and a concluding essay explore in detail the stories and texts that comprise the "catu" system."

Contributors Introduction Ellen Widmer Part I. Writing the Courtesan: 1. Ambiguous images of courtesan culture in late imperial China Paul S. Ropp 2. The late Ming courtesan: invention of a cultural ideal Wai-yee Li 3. T he written word and the bound foot: a history of the courtesan's aura Dorothy Ko 4. Desire and writing in the late Ming play Parrot Island Katherine Carlitz 5. Women in Feng Menglong's Mountain Songs Yasushi Oki Part II: Norms and Selves 6. Ming and Qing anthologies of women's poetry and their selection strategies Kang-i Sun Chang 7. Changing the subject: gender and self-inscription in authors' preafaces and Shi poetry Maureen Robertson Part III. Poems in Context: 8. Writing her way out of trouble: Li Yuying in history and fiction Ann Waltner 9. Embodying the disembodied: prepresentaions of ghosts and the feminine Judith T. Zeitlin 10. De/constructing a feminine ideal in the eighteenth century: random records of West-Green and the story of Shuangqing Grace S. Fong Part IV. 'Hong lou meng': 11. Womens writing before and within the Hong lou meng Huan Saussy 12. Beyong stereotypes: the twelve beauties in Qing court art and the Dream of the Red Chamber Wu Hung 13. Ming Loyalism and the women's voice in fiction after Hong lou meng Ellen Widmer Postface: Chinese women in a comparative perspective: a response Nancy Armstrong Reference matter Notes Works cited Character list Index.

This reflection on Errington's thought-provoking paper, by an intellectual historian and a student of Chinese philosophy, does not dispute her interpretive position on classical Malay literature in general and on hikayat in particular. Rather, it attempts to challenge three salient points of her argument: that the distinction between “oral” and “written” is a hazy one in the paratactic style of the hikayat; that the “images” in this type of literature are flat, repetitive and without content; and that the Malay art of story-telling is diametrically opposed to the rhetorical style of history characteristic of the post-Renaissance West. It is hoped that such a discussion will bring about fruitful encounters between scholars in different fields and disciplines in Asian studies.