Books in the Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph (HUP) series

This book uses Song China to explain how a pre-industrial regime organized itself spatially in order to exercise authority. By detailing the relationship between the court and local administration, Mostern complicates the received paradigm of Song centralization and decentralization.

Tang poetic culture was based on hand-copied manuscripts and oral performance. This study aims to engage the textual realities of medieval literature by shedding light on the material lives of poems during the Tang, from their initial oral or written instantiation through their often lengthy and twisted paths of circulation.

This book explores three discharged Ming officials in the sixteenth century-Wang Jiusi, Kang Hai, and Li Kaixian-who turned to literary endeavors when forced to retire. As their efforts reveal, a disappointing end to an official career and a physical move away from the center led to their embrace and pursuit of a marginalized literary genre, qu.

Liu Yuan's Lingyan ge, a woodblock-printed book from 1669, re-creates a portrait gallery that memorialized 24 vassals of the early Tang court. This study examines the dialogues created among the texts and images in Lingyan ge from multiple perspectives.

Four themes dominate this study of the late Mongol empire in Northeast Asia: the need for an all-inclusive regional perspective; pan-Asian integration under the Mongols; the tendency for individual and family interests to trump those of dynasty, country, or linguistic affiliation; and the need to see Koryo Korea as part of the wider Mongol empire.

During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some of China's elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, painting titles, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions-some transparent, others deliberately concealed.

P'ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. In the first book-length treatment in English of this art form, Pihl traces its history from roots in shamanism and folktales through its 19th-century heyday and discusses its evolution in the 20th century.

In this first systematic study in English of the highly influential yet overlooked thinker Xue Xuan (1389-1464), author Khee Heong Koh seeks to redress Xue's marginalization while showing how a study interested mainly in "ideas" can integrate social and intellectual history to offer a broader picture of history.

This book explores two important moments of dislocation in Chinese history, the early medieval period (317-589 CE) and the nineteenth century. Tian juxtaposes a rich array of materials from these two periods in comparative study, linking these historical moments in their unprecedented interactions, and intense fascination, with foreign cultures.

Through an exploration of contemporary Chinese popular religion from its cultural, social, and material perspectives, Wei-Ping Lin paints a broad picture of the dynamics of popular religion in Taiwan. Analyzing these aspects of religious practice in a unified framework, she traces their transformation as adherents move from villages to cities.

This important new study explores the impact of Neo-Confucianism on Korean society and politics between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Based on an extensive study of Jianyang imprints, genealogies of the leading families of printers, local histories, documents, and annotated catalogs and bibliographies, Printing for Profit is not only a history of commercial printing but also a wide-ranging study of the culture of the book in traditional China.

Examining the transnational film star system and the formations of historically important stars, Making Personas casts new light on Japanese modernity from the 1910s to 1930s. The book shows how film stardom began and evolved, looking at the production, representation, circulation, and reception of performers' images in film and other media.

Richard Davis has expertly crafted a stirring narrative of the last years of Song, focusing on loyalist resistance to Mongol domination as more than just a political event. Seen from the perspective of the conquered, the phenomenon of martyrdom reveals much about the cultural history of the Song.

In Four Cries of a Gibbon by the late-Ming dynasty playwright Xu Wei, characters move between life and death, and male and female, as they seek to articulate who they truly are. In this first critical study and annotated translation, Kwa considers how Wei's exploration of identity paved the way for further reflection in later fiction and drama.

The earliest anthology of Chinese poetry, the Book of Poems, has served as an ideal of literary perfection and also a major subject of literary criticism since imperial times. Rusk unravels the competitive, mutually influential relationship through which classical and literary scholarship on the poems co-evolved from the Han dynasty to the Qing.

The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire at the turn of the twentieth century created numerous literary contact nebulae. This book analyzes three of them: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature.

A reference work from one of the world's preeminent linguists, A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary substantially enlarges and revises Jerry Norman's 1978 Concise Manchu-English Lexicon. With hundreds of new entries and a new introduction on pronunciation and script, it will become the standard English-language resource on the Manchu language.

The dominant literary genre in Song dynasty China, shi poetry reflected profound changes occurring in Chinese culture from 960-1279. Michael Fuller traces the intertwining of shi poetry and Neo-Confucianism that led to the cultural synthesis of the last years of the Southern Song and set the pattern of Chinese society for the next six centuries.

David M. Robinson explores how grand displays like the royal hunt, archery contests, and the imperial menagerie were presented in literature and art in the early Ming dynasty. He argues these spectacles were highly contested sites where emperors and court ministers staked competing claims about rulership and the role of the military in the polity.

In medieval Japanese literature, the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism began to be incorporated into the teaching of waka poetry. The main figure in this development was 13th-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, whose commentaries transformed secular texts into allegories of Buddhist enlightenment.

The 18th-century Chinese novel Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars), Wu Jingzi's (1701-54) ironic portrait of literati life, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism.

The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China's literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing.