Early Modern Comparative Approaches to Literary Early Modernity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Porter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
Analogical Comparison

Modern Chinese literature is often understood as marking a self-consciously cosmopolitan departure from a long and largely autochthonous literary tradition. The binary between “modern” and “traditional” implicit in this view forecloses the possibility of reading individual works and broader literary developments in the late Ming and early Qing alongside European counterparts as part of a shared early modernity. After reviewing the emergence of and lively scholarly debates around the notion of “early modern China,” this chapter proposes a model of analogical comparison as a means of avoiding some of the methodological pitfalls that are increasingly seen to imperil scholarship that places works from China and Europe in an explicitly comparative framework. Eighteenth-century satirical fictions by Wu Jingzi and Henry Fielding are juxtaposed to demonstrate the usefulness of such a model in rethinking individual works of a national tradition in relation to a more global conception of modern literary history.

scholarly journals Sounding Silence: Inspiration And Passiveness In The Reading Of Early Modern Women

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Essig García
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Silent Reading ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Material Change ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Las Mujeres

Abstract: cultural and material change described by historians of reading intersects with literary history in different and complex ways. An example is the cultural practice of silent reading in intimacy, which came to be pivotal for the literature of sensibility. It was gendered female in the eighteenth century and looked upon with disfavour, notably by moralists and pedagogues. However, not very long before, silent reading was associated with spirituality and women’s religious experiences, and was compatible with the virtues expected of the “lady of the Renaissance”. Several texts from the seventeenth century, notably diaries by women, will be discussed. Título en español: “Resonancia del silencio: inspiración y pasividad en la lectura femenina en el siglo XVII”.Resumen:los cambios culturales y materiales que describe la historia de la lectura entran en relaciones variadas y complejas con la historia literaria. Un ejemplo de esa dialéctica es la evolución de la práctica de la lectura silenciosa en recogimiento, que alcanzó una importancia extraordinaria para la novelística del Dieciocho. Se consideraba propia de las mujeres y estaba mal vista por moralistas y pedagogos. No mucho antes, empero, la lectura en silencio había sido un componente de la experiencia espiritual y religiosa de la mujer del Renacimiento, y como tal compatible con las virtudes femeninas. El artículo incluye comentarios de varios textos del diecisiete, en particular diarios de mujeres.

Hong Kong in the Midst of Colonialism, Collaborative and Critical Nationalism from 1925 to 1930

China Report ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Lin Shaoyang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
New Culture Movement

In the late 1920s, cultural nationalism in Hong Kong was imbedded in Confucianism, having been disappointed with the New Culture Movement and Chinese revolutionary nationalism.1 It also inspired British collaborative colonialism. This study attempts to explain the link between Hong Kong and the Confucius Revering Movement by analysing the essays on Hong Kong of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature and one of the most important revolutionary thinkers in modern China. The Confucius Revering Movement, which extended from mainland China to the Southeast Asian Chinese community and then to Hong Kong, formed a highly interrelated network of Chinese cultural nationalism associated with Confucianism. However, the movements in these three places had different cultural and political roles in keeping with their own contexts. Collaborative colonialism’s interference with the Confucius Revering Movement is one way to understand Lu Xun’s critical reading of Hong Kong. That is, Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement was seen as an endeavour of the colonial authorities to co-opt Confucianism in order to deal with influences from China. This article argues that Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement should be regarded as one of the main perspectives through which to understand Hong Kong’s educational, cultural and political histories from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Lu Xun enables us to see several links. The first link is the one connecting the Confucius Revering Movement in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the Chinese community in Southeast Asia. This leads to the second link, that is, Lim Boen Keng (Lin Wenqing), the leading figure of the Confucius Revering Movement in the Southeast Asian Chinese community who later became the President of Amoy University, where Lu Xun had taught before his first visit to Hong Kong. The third link is the skilful colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who came to British Malaya in February 1930 to become Governor after being the Governor of Hong Kong. We can observe a network of Chinese critical/resistant and collaborative nationalism from these links.

Narrative Fiction in Early Modern Europe

Quaerendo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 160-188
Author(s):  
Rita Schlusemann ◽  
Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Fictional Narrative ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The article presents a corpus of European fictional narratives, which were continuously printed in at least six European languages from the beginning of printing until the end of the eighteenth century. It analyses the denominations of the works in European literary histories in a comparative way in order to show the impact of the different national traditions in literary history, and provides a survey of the contemporary terms for the works used in European vernaculars. In early modern Europe there was an awareness of the congruence of these narratives and a similar choice of genre attributions in different European vernaculars whereas, as a consequence of the development of nationalism and national studies, the denomination of the genre and their studies has become much more tattered. We therefore propose to use the term ‘narrative fiction’ for the genre and the term ‘fictional narrative’ for the works themselves.

The carmen heroicum in Early Modernity (Das carmen heroicum in der frühen Neuzeit)

Daphnis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Uwe Maximilian Korn ◽  
Dirk Werle ◽  
Katharina Worms
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epic Poems ◽  
History Of Literature

The special issue at hand provides a contribution to the historical exploration of early modern carmina heroica (epic poems) in the German area of the early modern period, especially of the ‘long’ 17th century. To this purpose, perspectives of Latin and German Studies, of researchers with expertise in medieval and modern literary history, are brought together. This introductory article puts the following theses up for discussion: 1) The view that epic poems of the early modern period are a genre with little relevance for the history of literature is wrong and has to be corrected. 2) Accordingly, the view has to be corrected that the history of narrative in the modern era leads teleologically to the modern novel. 3) For the exploration of the history of carmina heroica, the traditions of didactic poems and heroic poems have to be taken into consideration together. 4) Epic poems of the ‘long’ 17th century have a particular tendency to generic hybridization. 5) The genre history of carmina heroica can be reconstructed appropriately only by taking into account the vernacular as well as the Latin tradition.

When “Early” Modern Colonialism Comes Late

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Flexner ◽  
Matthew Spriggs
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
New Hebrides ◽  
Archaeological Materials ◽  
Cultural Expansion ◽  
Local Perspectives

The Early Modern Period of world history is framed in terms of centuries1400–1800 CE. A host of major transformations occurred within global environments, economies, religions, and societies. Yet, these broad trends are countered by evidence for local dynamics that diverge from the grander sweep of history. This was true in Remote Oceania, where colonial encounters were few and far between prior to the later part of the eighteenth century. While acknowledging that there is a use for abstract periods and themes, archaeological materials provide a counterpoint to the stories that grow out of histories penned in broad strokes. The Melanesian archipelago of Vanuatu provides a valuable case in point. Evidence from ethnohistory and archaeology counters the idea that early modern transitions were results of European cultural expansion. Local perspectives emphasize the centrality of Melanesian islanders in local and regional colonial history, especially in the adoption and adaptation of Christianity. The part of Vanuatu’s history that might be referred to as early modernity goes past the usual temporal boundaries of this period, since it was not until the early twentieth century that a formal” colonial regime was established in New Hebrides (as Vanuatu was called before its independence in 1980).

Remembering the Elephant: Animal Reason before the Eighteenth Century

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (5) ◽  
pp. 1149-1165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Alkemeyer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
High Intelligence

Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.

scholarly journals Gender and Superstition in Modern Chinese Literature

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 588
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Literary Methods ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Era

This article offers a new perspective on the study of the discourse on superstition (mixin) in modern China. Drawing upon recent work on the import of the concept “superstition” to the colonial world during the 19th century, the article intervenes in the current study of the circulation of discursive constructs in area studies. This intervention is done in two ways: first, I identify how in the modern era missionaries and Western empires collaborated in linking anti-superstition thought to discourses on women’s liberation. Couched in promises of civilizational progress to cultures who free their women from backward superstitions, this historical connection between empire, gender and modern knowledge urges us to reorient our understanding of superstition merely as the ultimate other of “religion” or “science.” Second, in order to explore the nuances of the connection between gender and superstition, I turn to an archive that is currently understudied in the research on superstition in China. I propose that we mine modern Chinese literature by using literary methods. I demonstrate this proposal by reading China’s first feminist manifesto, The Women’s Bell by Jin Tianhe and the short story Medicine by Lu Xun.

The Literary Field and the Field of Power: The Case of Modern China

Paragraph ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Hockx
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Literary Communities ◽  
State Interference

This article discusses ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's literary sociology has inspired scholarship on modern Chinese literature, helping it to move away from overly politicized paradigms of literary historiography. The article also asks the question to what extent the use of a Bourdieusian model has resulted in an overemphasis on the ‘relative autonomy’ of a literary field that, at various times during the twentieth century, has been operating under conditions of strong direct state interference. After giving a general overview of the use of Bourdieu's ideas in the study of modern Chinese literature, the article focuses especially on the question of autonomy and the state, arguing for the study of state censors as specific ‘agents’ within the literary field. The article ends with a brief discussion of the rapid rise of online literary communities in China, their practices and their relation to state institutions.

Two outstanding literary phenomena of the Chinese literature at the end of the 20th century

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9
Author(s):  
Chanh Nguyen Thi Mai
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Critical Observation ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Literary Composition ◽  
Objective Research ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

Song thực ra, nếu không có cái định mệnh như thế thì đã không có lịch sử văn học đích thực. Việc đặt vấn đề nghiên cứu một cách khách quan những đóng góp của các hiện tượng văn xuôi nổi bật cuối thế kỉ XX đối với sự phát triển của văn học đương đại Trung Quốc là điều hết sức cần thiết. The emergence of some literary phenomena in Chinese literature at the end of the 20th century was the last hit to the collapse of the literature order that had been established since several centuries ago after the founding of new China (1949). This emergence is considered equivalent to the establishment of an innovative literary concept, bringing literary composition and delivery closer to the nature of the literature. Nowadays, upon discussing the Chinese literary phenomenon at the end of the 20th century, it is inevitable to connect it with the life-long career of an aging generation of writers. To unearth the contribution of this generation is somehow similar to an archeologist’s work and also comparable to the critical observation of a turning point in the literary history. Elements that those literary phenomena used to strive to overthrow in order to replace them with new concepts have been eradicated or outdated, which seems to be the “fate” of any “pioneering” movement. However, that fate is inevitable during the course of literary history. Therefore, it is deemed vital to conduct an objective research on the contributions of the outstanding literary phenomena at the end of the 20th century to the development of modern Chinese literature.

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