Xiaolin Duan’s book, The Rise of West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty, based on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington in 2014, essentially concerns how literati si...

This literary and cultural study of zidishu, translated for simplicity as “bannermen tales,” describes and analyzes the experiences of the composers, performers, and audience for these tales during...

This is a fine anthology of Lu Xun’s work, different from other collections in including mostly essays and other shorter pieces, none of them fiction.All writers and editors hope that readers will ...

Li Shicen is a representative intellectual during the May 4th Movement time. With a Strong Time Mission, he went to study and travel abroad to several countries. His life is summarized into three s...

This article investigates the politics of eating during the Northern Song period. In particular, it aims to consider the historical-political circumstances that gave rise to two polarizing schools of gastronomic practices: the excessive gourmands who viewed food as an expression of wealth and social status and the frugal literati who condemned this gustatory indulgence as unvirtuous and morally improper

bidden in state shrines. Chapter 6 details a surge in the publication of gazetteers and the local literature, works that celebrated Suzhou’s history and customs. Chapter 7 examines literati attempts to legitimize the rule of Zhang Shicheng, a contender to power in the late Yuan who established his capital in Suzhou. Together, these chapters show that nineteenth century elites took advantage of a less

Both the 1562 dream encyclopedia Mengzhan yizhi 夢占逸旨 (Guidelines for Dream Divination) and the 1636 dream encyclopedia Menglin xuanjie 夢林玄解 (An Explication of the Profundities in the Forest of Dreams) consisted of individual examples of accurately divined dream interpretations whose cumulative weight proved that the divination techniques worked consistently and should be used. The content of the dream

The underlying premise of this essay is that travel, as a leisure or recreational activity, appears first as a common literary theme during the Song dynasty (960–1279), and that the informal prose ji 記 writings of Su Shi 蘇軾 (or Su Dongpo 蘇東坡; 1037–1101) are representative of this new trend. While some post-Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) personalities, such as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (Zhulin

Leisure is not doing nothing: it involves complex signifying practices that communicate social status and have to be performed to be legible to others. The practice of leisure fills the pages of the eight-year diary of Li Rihua (1565–1635), an artist and art collector of the late Ming who devoted an extended mourning sabbatical to building a major art collection and socializing with like-minded colleagues

Using Wang Bizhi's (1031–1097?) Record of Enjoyable Conversations at Sheng River (Shengshui yantan lu) as a case study, this essay examines the significant place leisurely gathering and bantering occupied in the lives of Song educated men. It argues that Wang's work, and that of his peers, points to a new vision of the scholar-official ideal. Time spent on chatting, gossiping, and in the company of