Books in the Harvard East Asian Monographs series

Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are full of suggestive sounds. Characters curse in colorful dialect accents, and action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords. Paize Keulemans examines the relationship between these novels and earlier storyteller manuscripts to explain the purpose and history of these sounds.

Investing Japan demonstrates that foreign investment is a vital and misunderstood aspect of Japan's modern economic development. This study investigates the role played by foreign companies in the Japanese experience of modernization, highlighting their identity as key agents in the processes of industrialization and technology transfer.

Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the powers of the state and of local elites, Lee shows that state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing.

Catherine L. Phipps examines a largely unacknowledged system of "special trading ports" that operated under full Japanese jurisdiction in the shadow of the better-known treaty ports. Phipps demonstrates why the special trading ports were key to Japan's achieving autonomy and regional power during the pivotal second half of the nineteenth century.

From the 1910s to the 1940s, a wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the Korean cultural scene with differing agendas but shared demands for equality and social justice. Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture, focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression.

The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Chapters analyze the Korean experience from a wide range of economic and social perspectives, as well as describing the country's economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met.

Focusing on Japan's Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China's northeastern provinces, Emer O'Dwyer traces the history of Japan's prewar Manchurian empire over four decades to show how South Manchuria was naturalized as a Japanese space and how this process contributed to the success of the Japanese army's early 1930s takeover of Manchuria.

Stigmatized throughout Japanese history as outcastes, the burakumin are contemporary Japan's largest minority. In this study of youths from two different communities, Christopher Bondy explores how individuals navigate their social world, demonstrating the ways in which people make conscious decisions about disclosing a stigmatized identity.

By the late eleventh century the Song court no longer dominated production of information about itself. Hilde De Weert demonstrates how the growing involvement of the literati in publishing such information altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the Chinese imperial period.

Zhao Ma explores lower-class women's struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife in Beijing from 1937 to 1949. He shows how the everyday survival tactics they devised allowed them to subtly deflect, subvert, and "escape without leaving" powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics.

Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals' visions of national rejuvenation. Mingwei Song combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman.

Elizabeth Kindall's definitive study elucidates the context for the paintings of Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673) and identifies geo-narrative as a distinct landscape-painting tradition lauded for its naturalistic immediacy, experiential topography, and dramatic narratives of moral persuasion, class identification, and biographical commemoration.

Timothy J. Van Compernolle reconsiders the rise of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility, arguing that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.

Beheaded for plotting against the Qing empire, poet Qiu Jin would later be celebrated as a Republican martyr and China's first feminist. Hu Ying studies Qiu's enduring bond with Wu Zhiying and Xu Zihua, who braved political persecution to keep her legacy alive. In doing so, their friendship fulfilled its ultimate socially transformative potential.

Heekyoung Cho investigates the meanings and functions that translation generated for modern national literatures during their formative period and reconsiders literature as part of a dynamic translational process of negotiating foreign values. Cho's study focuses on literary and cultural relations among Russia, Japan, and colonial Korea.

Mark E. Byington explores the formation, history, and legacy of ancient Puyo, the earliest archaeologically attested state to arise in northeastern Asia. He discusses how the legacy of Puyo contributed to modes of statecraft of later northeast Asian states and provided a basis for a developing historiographical tradition on the Korean peninsula.

Matthew Fraleigh examines the life and works of Narushima Ryuhoku (1837-1884): Confucian scholar, world traveler, pioneering journalist, and irrepressible satirist. This is the first book-length study of Ryuhoku in a Western language and one of the first Western-language monographs to examine Sinitic poetry and prose composition in modern Japan.

Movements of people-through migration, exile, and diaspora-are central to understanding power relationships in Japan 900-1400. But what of more literary moves: texts with abrupt genre leaps or poetic figures that flatten distances? Terry Kawashima examines what happens when both types of tropes-literal travels and literary shifts-coexist.

Chien-hsin Tsai examines the reinvention of loyalism in colonial Taiwan through the lens of literature. He analyzes the ways in which writers from colonial Taiwan-including Qiu Fengjia, Lian Heng, and Wu Zhuoliu-creatively and selectively employed loyalist ideals to cope with Japanese colonialism and its many institutional changes.

W. Puck Brecher overturns standard narratives of wartime Japan's racial attitudes, focusing on the experiences of Western civilians rather than enemy POWs in Japan. His bold thesis is borne out by a broad mosaic of stories of police harassment, suspicion, relocation, starvation, internment, and torture, as well as extraordinary acts of charity.

Brian Steininger revisits Japan's mid-Heian court of the Tale of Genji and the Pillow Book, where literary Chinese was not only the basis of official administration, but also a medium for political protest, sermons of mourning, and poems of celebration.

Lisa Yoshikawa explores the role history and historians played in imperial Japan's nation and empire building from the 1890s to the 1930s. Through a close reading of vast, multilingual sources, Yoshikawa argues that scholarship and politics were inseparable as Japan's historical profession developed.

Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of the Northeast Tohoku region of Japan to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan's shifting self-images since World War II.

Revolutionary Waves analyzes the crowd in the Chinese cultural and political imagination and its global resonances by delving into a wide range of fiction, philosophy, poetry, and psychological studies-raising questions about the promise and peril of community as communion and reimagining collective life in China's post-socialist present.

Since 1979 China's leaders have introduced reforms that have lessened the state's hold over the lives of ordinary citizens. By examining the growth in individual rights, the public sphere, democratic processes, and pluralization, Ogden seeks to answer questions concerning the relevance of liberal democratic ideas for China.

The incorporation of Taiwan into the Qing empire in the 17th century and its evolution into a province by the late 19th century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of the Chinese domain. Here, Teng takes the view of Taiwan-China relations as a product of the history of Qing expansionism.

Roth explores the role of traditions in the institutional development of the noh theater from the 14th century-late 20th century. He focuses on the development of key traditions that constitute the "ethos of noh," the ideology that empowered certain groups of actors at the expense of others, and how this ethos fostered noh's professionalization.

Distinctive female dress styles, gender divisions of labor, and powerful same-sex networks have long distinguished villages in this coastal region of southeastern China from other rural Han communities. Intimate Politics explores these practices that have constituted eastern Hui'an residents, women in particular, as an anomaly among rural Han.

Underlying Nanjing's 1930s policies was a concern for the capital's image-offensive people were allowed to exist as long as they remained invisible. Lipkin exposes the process of social engineering and the ways in which the suppressed reacted to their abuse; he puts the poor at the center of the picture, defying efforts to make them invisible.

Founded in the 1820s, the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) was a premier academy of its time. Miles examines the discourse that portrayed it as having radically altered Guangzhou literati culture. He argues that the academy's location embedded it in social settings that determined who used its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.