The Fu Genre Of Imperial China

The first volume in English to examine the fu, one of the major genres of Chinese literature, from its origins up to the late imperial era.

The fu genre is one of the major genres of Chinese poetry throughout imperial history. This volume presents close readings and translations of representative works spanning over a millennium.

The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

Along China's Yellow River, a mighty and technologically advanced civilization grew and flourished for thousands of years without any contact from the rest of the world. Life in Ancient China explores the daily lives of early the Chinese people, profiles the great dynasties that ruled China over the centuries, and introduces important religious and philosophical contributions, such as Confucianism, Daosim, and Buddhism. Enduring Chinese innovations, such as writing, papermaking, and The Great Wall are also featured.

The studies brought together here focus upon the literary and cultural activity of the Chinese court during the Han and early medieval period. The first section concerns court literature in the Former Han and deals with the role of literature, especially poetry, at both the imperial and princely courts, including one study of the writings attributed to an imperial concubine, who used poetry to express her resentment at falling from the emperor's favour. The next section looks at a leading court writer of the Late Western Han dynasty, Yang Xiong, while the third part deals with the leading poetic genre of this period, the fu or rhapsody. These papers examine major themes such as praise, travel, dating and authenticity, and problems of translation. The volume concludes with two articles on food culture in early and medieval China.

"McCraw enables the reader of English to approximate the experience of encountering the peerless lyricist's poems in Chinese." --Sino-Platonic Papers "This is a remarkable labor of love from an enthusiastic admirer of Du Fu, and should be recommended to all lovers of Chinese poetry." --China Review International, Spring 1996

Scholars from the fields of literature, history, and art history apply a range of methodologies to newly discovered works by women writers and to other sources concerning women writers in China from 1600 to 1900.

“Information” has become a core concept across the disciplines, yet it is still often seen as a unique feature of the Western world that became central only in the digital age. In this book, leading experts turn to China’s textual tradition to show the significance of information for reconceptualizing the work of literary history, from its beginnings to the present moment. Contributors trace the organization of literary information across China’s three millennia of history, examining the forms and practices of information management that have evolved alongside the increasing scale and complexity of textual production. They reimagine literary history as information processing, detailing the many kinds of storage, encoding, sorting, and transmission that constitute and feed back into China’s long and ever-growing cultural tradition. The volume features state-of-the-field essays on all major forms of literary information management, from graphs to internet literature, and from commentaries to literary museums and archives. By shifting focus from individual works and their authors to the informatic schemata of literature, it identifies three scales of information management—the word, the document, and the collection—and surveys the forms that operate at each level, such as the dictionary, the anthology, and the library. Literary Information in China is a groundbreaking work that provides a systematic and innovative reassessment of literary history with implications that extend beyond the particular Chinese context, revealing how informatic practices shape literary tradition.

This book argues that political persuasion expanded in early imperial China through diverse written genres, and that what ancient Chinese called wenti jingwei, or genre networks, provides the central means to understand rhetoric and government at the time.