Books in the Modern Language Initiative Books series

Honorable Mention for the 2016 Kayden Book Award This first book-length study in Chinese or any Western language of personal letters and letter-writing in premodern China focuses on the earliest period (ca. 3rd-6th cent. CE) with a sizeable body of surviving correspondence. Along with the translation and analysis of many representative letters, Antje Richter explores the material culture of letter writing (writing supports and utensils, envelopes and seals, the transportation of finished letters) and letter-writing conventions (vocabulary, textual patterns, topicality, creativity). She considers the status of letters as a literary genre, ideal qualities of letters, and guides to letter-writing, providing a wealth of examples to illustrate each component of the standard personal letter. References to letter-writing in other cultures enliven the narrative throughout.Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China makes the social practice and the existing textual specimens of personal Chinese letter-writing fully visible for the first time, both for the various branches of Chinese studies and for epistolary research in other ancient and modern cultures, and encourages a more confident and consistent use of letters as historical and literary sources.

As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolutionan overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a privileged realm of romance and individualism symbolizing the post-revolutionary freedoms of economic and affective autonomy, womens roles in particular have been transformed, with the ideal iron girl of socialism replaced by the feminine, family-oriented good wife and wise mother.Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China's soaring divorce rate. Reading popular divorce narratives in fiction, film, and TV drama, Hui Faye Xiao shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China. While these narratives present womens cultivation of wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for family disintegration and social unrest, Xiao shows that they in fact reflect a problematic resurgence of traditional gender roles and a powerful mode of control over supposedly autonomous private life.

Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of death, poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from Chinas continued self-identity as a nation of poetry (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within Chinas media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule.As the first book to deal explicitly with the discourses and functioning of scenes within the Chinese cultural context, Verse Going Viral will be of value to students and scholars of Chinese literature, cultural studies, and media, as well as to general readers interested in China's dynamic cultural scenes.

Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "e;Golden Age"e; of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian migr. His most successful and scandalous dramas--The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan--were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land.Gordin's life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one's past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.

By examining the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine, Novel Medicine demonstrates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge in China, beginning in the sixteenth century. Critical readings of fictional and medical texts provide a counterpoint to prevailing narratives that focus only on the literati aspects of the novel, showing that these texts were not merely read, but were used by a wide variety of readers for a range of purposes. The intersection of knowledgefictional and real, elite and vernacularilluminates the history of reading and daily life and challenges us to rethink the nature of Chinese literature.

God's Little Daughters examines a set of letters written by Chinese Catholic women from a small village in Manchuria to their French missionary, "e;Father Lin,"e; or Dominique Maurice Pourqui, who in 1870 had returned to France in poor health after spending twenty-three years at the local mission of the Socit des Missions Etrangres de Paris (MEP). The letters were from three sisters of the Du family, who had taken religious vows and committed themselves to a life of contemplation and worship that allowed them rare privacy and the opportunity to learn to read and write. Inspired by a close reading of the letters, Ji Li explores how French Catholic missionaries of the MEP translated and disseminated their Christian message in northeast China from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, and how these converts interpreted and transformed their Catholic faith to articulate an awareness of self. The interplay of religious experience, rhetorical skill, and gender relations revealed in the letters allow us to reconstruct the neglected voices of Catholic women in rural China.

Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their "e;New World"e; and mingling with native cultures. Writing the South Seas explains why Nanyang encounters, neglected by most literary histories, should be considered crucial to the national literatures of China and Southeast Asia.