The Promise and Peril of Things : : Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China / / Wai-yee Li.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2022
• VerfasserIn: Li, Wai-yee,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Ano de Publicação: 2022
• Idioma: English
• Descrição Física: 1 online resource
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Abbreviations --; Introduction --; CHAPTER ONE People and Things --; CHAPTER TWO Elegance and Vulgarity --; CHAPTER THREE The Real and the Fake --; CHAPTER FOUR Lost and Found --; Epilogue --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index
• Resumo: Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict.Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions—people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found—to tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss.The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu’s writings, and Wu Weiye’s poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history.
• Formato: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780231553896; 9783110749663; 9783110993899; 9783110994810; 9783110993752; 9783110993738
• DOI: 10.7312/li--20102
• Acesso: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Wai-yee Li.

Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things defin...