Books published by Harvard University, Asia Center

This book traces how questions about the nature of the Chinese empire and of the human community were addressed in fiction through extreme situations: husbands and wives torn apart in periods of upheaval, families so disrupted that incestuous encounters become inevitable, times so desperate that people must sell themselves to be eaten.

Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious, social, and art historians, this book seeks to recover the motivations behind the creation of religious art, including temple buildings, sculpture, and wall paintings.

As descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) and his son Teika (1162-1244), the heirs of the Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage spanning over eight centuries. Carter combines family history, literary criticism, and historical research in a coherent narrative tracking the evolution of the Reizei Way.

This book demonstrates that representations of Buddhism by lay people underwent a major change during the T'ang-Sung transition. These changes built on basic transformations within the Buddhist and classicist traditions and sometimes resulted in the use of Buddhism and Buddhist temples as frames of reference to evaluate aspects of lay society.

The vision of poetic competence evolved for over a millennium from calculated performances of inherited words to sincere passionate outbursts to displays of verbal wit combining calculation with the appearance of spontaneity. This book tells the story of the development of poetic competence to uncover the complexity of the concept.

Examining the development of literature depicting the native place (furusato) from the mid-Meiji period through the late 1930s as a way of articulating the uprootedness and sense of loss many experienced as Japan modernized, this book focuses on four authors typing this trend: Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Toson, Sato Haruo, and Shiga Naoya.

In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues that South Korea's contemporary urban middle class not only exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition of Koreans to seek high status.

Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, Steven B. Miles describes the circulation of people through one of the world's great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

Bannermen Tales is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive study of zidishu-a popular storytelling genre created by the Manchus in early eighteenth-century Beijing. With original translations, musical score, and numerous illustrations of hand-copied and printed texts, this study opens a new window into Qing literature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this in-depth study, Felix Boecking challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. It argues instead that international trade, government tariff revenues, and hence China's fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed.

The author focuses on ordinary religious professionals, most of whom remained obscure temple employees, showing that these Taoists were neither the socially despised illiterates dismissed in so many studies, nor otherworldly ascetics, but active participants in the religious economy of the city.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Red Legacies in China, Mao-era legacies serve as a framework to examine the cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China's continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Essays discuss arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials.

Scholars have described the eighteenth century in China as a time of "state activism" and often associate the Taiping Rebellion and postbellum restoration efforts with the origins of elite activism. Seunghyun Han, however, argues that the ascendance of elite activism can be traced to the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns in the early nineteenth century.

Celestial Masters is the first book in any Western language devoted solely to the founding of Daoism. It traces the movement from the mid-second century CE through the sixth century, and provides a detailed analysis of ritual life within the movement, covering the roles of common believer or Daoist citizen, novice, and priest or libationer.

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.

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.

The writer Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) has been described as a consummate stylist of classical prose. Timothy Van Compernolle investigates the social dimensions of Ichiyo's imagination and argues that she reworked the Japanese literary tradition in order to understand and critique the emerging modernity of the Meiji period.

Between 1751 and 1784, the Qianlong emperor embarked upon six southern tours-largely exercises in political theater-traveling from Beijing to Jiangnan and back. This study elucidates the tensions and negotiations characterizing the relationship between the imperial center and Jiangnan, which straddled the two key provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Unlike traditional Japanese literature, with its rich tradition of comedy, modern Japanese literature is commonly associated with high seriousness. Cohn analyzes works by three writers-Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993), Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), and Inoue Hisashi (1934- )-that assault the notion that comedy cannot be part of serious literature.