Browse results

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 10 items for :

  • Literature & Culture x
  • Just Published x
  • Search level: Titles x
Clear All
Series Editors: , , and

East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture responds to the urgent need for a more complex understanding and appreciation of this region by publishing substantial comparative research on the literary and cultural traditions of East Asia and their relation to the world. We showcase original research on the methodology and practice of comparison, including intra- and trans-regional comparisons of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam; explorations of entanglements and mutual representations of Western and East Asian traditions; examinations of the relationship between the East Asian Sinographic Sphere and non-Sinographic textual cultures such as Manchu, Uyghur, and Tibetan; and multipolar comparisons that examine East Asian literatures and cultures in the light of their relations with South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America.

The series focuses on the interpretive sciences, namely core humanities disciplines such as literature, history, religion, philosophy and thought, art history, musicology, performance or media studies. It also welcomes contributions adopting culturally-informed approaches in archeology, historical geography, anthropology, political science, sociology, or linguistics. Our historical moment demands that we as scholars combine comparative analysis with the depth of area-study-expertise and philology, theoretical acumen, and a courageous orientation towards the exploration of fundamental questions that matter to us today. This is the tall order that this book series and the authors we feature are taking on. We are confident, however, that East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture will enable a deeper mutual understanding, and successfully integrate knowledge about and approaches to different literary and cultural traditions through critical comparative examination. We see clearly the relevance of the humanities to the world we are living in now, and aim to make significant contributions to humanistic scholarship and, ultimately, to the creation of a less divisive, more equal, and better world for all.

Series Editors' Foreword


Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Stephanie Carta and Masja Horn.

Please see our Guidelines for a Book Proposal. All submissions are subject to a double-anonymous peer review process prior to publication.
Author:
After the strikingly beautiful Peony Pavilion, how could one write about love and the ideal of emotional authenticity (qing) in the chuanqi genre?
This book presents a group of creative dramatists who confronted this challenge by giving the romantic theme of chuanqi their unique comic twists. This book demonstrates how their comic articulations bring the qing ideal down to the mundane world of family obligations, political ambitions, commercial interests, and gender frustrations.
By highlighting the crucial but understudied role that the comic plays, this book enriches our understanding of the intellectual depth and critical scope of the chuanqi genre.
The Construction of the Feminine Voice in Early Medieval Chinese Literature
Author:
This book studies the formation of the male-constructed conventional voice of women in Chinese literature from the 3rd to 6th century.
It highlights specific moments during which the feminine voice became recognized, accepted, and stabilized, including the shift of focus from the performative to the textual in female representations; the formation of a male literary community; the popularity of romanticized historical narratives; and the emerging sense of literary history.
This study emphasizes the historicity of the feminine voice and strives to question and challenge established notions about textual stability, authorship, the literary canon, and literary history.
The Lives and Legacy of Kim Sisŭp (1435–1493) offers an account of the most extraordinary figure of Korean literature and intellectual history. The present work narrates the fascinating story of a prodigious child, acclaimed poet, author of the first Korean novel, Buddhist monk, model subject, Confucian recluse and Daoist master. No other Chosŏn scholar or writer has been venerated in both Confucian shrines and Buddhist temples, had his works widely read in Tokugawa Japan and became an integral part of the North Korean literary canon.
The nine studies and further materials presented in this volume provide a detailed look on the various aspects of Kim Sisŭp’s life and work as well as a reflection of both traditional and modern narratives surrounding his legacy. Contributors are: Vladimír Glomb, Gregory N. Evon, Dennis Wuerthner, Barbara Wall, Kim Daeyeol, Miriam Löwensteinová, Anastasia A. Guryeva, Sixiang Wang, and Diana Yüksel.
Alternative Models of Ethics and Axiology in Times of Global Crises
Author:
Environmental disasters, unequal distribution of resources, viral pandemics, and other types of trans-national disasters, are global crises that cannot be solved within the narrow framework of individual nation-states. They must be addressed through global cooperation and solidarity. Such strategies require intercultural dialog that goes beyond fashionable slogans and can lead to a truly equal exchange of knowledge and ideas.

Towards this endeavour, this book by Jana S. Rošker focuses on the traditional Confucian ethic of relationism, which historically spread throughout many regions of East Asia. She examines the specific features of relational ethics and explores its possible contribution to the new global ethics.
Was plurilingualism the exception or the norm in traditional Eurasian scholarship? This volume presents a selection of primary sources—in many cases translated into English for the first time—with introductions that provide fascinating historical materials for challenging notions of the ways in which traditional Eurasian scholars dealt with plurilingualism and monolingualism. Comparative in approach, global in scope, and historical in orientation, it engages with the growing discussion of plurilingualism and focuses on fundamental scholarly practices in various premodern and early modern societies—Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian, Jewish, Islamic, Ancient Greek, and Roman—asking how these were conceived by the agents themselves. The volume will be an indispensable resource for courses on these subjects and on the history of scholarship and reflection on language throughout the world.
The Rivers and Lakes Poets of the Southern Song
Author:
Translator:
Zhang explores the sociohistorical environment that produced those poets, an era of political intrigues, geopolitical threats, the rise of commodity economy, flourishing popular culture, and glamorous urban life. Poetry was their means of livelihood as they drifted between low positions or as commoners, living by procuring favors from the powerful elite. The sadness and joys of a life in precarity shaped their thematic and stylistic choices, response to contemporary literary trends, and choice of poetic models. They formed a broad social network that straddled the scholar-officials and ordinary townsmen. While their poetry reflects the characteristics and concerns of both classes, there emerged a shared voice distinctly their own that turned the tide of poetry in the 13th century.
Editor / Translator:
Contrary to the usual sympathetic image of Kang Youwei found in historical studies, The Big Cheat offers a starkly negative portrayal of Kang. Its author, Huang Shizhong, a late Qing revolutionary and prolific author of over 20 novels, depicts Kang as a lifelong master fraud. His attack on Kang sheds light on the reform-revolution divide featured in every narrative about the rise of modern China.

Huang’s novel stands as a period testimony to the political and ideological struggles for China’s future during the last years of the Qing dynasty before it fell in 1912. This is the first English language edition of the novel, translated by Luke S. K. Kwong, who offers an extensive introduction contextualizing Huang's novel in historical perspective.
Sayings, Memory, Verse, and Knowledge
Author:
As the first study of manuscript collections, this book asks what changes when sayings, stories, songs, and spells are brought together on the same carrier.
Covering a plethora of manuscripts from the Warring States and early empires, and spanning sources from philosophy, historiography, poetry, and technical literature, this study describes the whole life-cycle of multiple texts collected on a single manuscript.
Drawing on comparative and interdisciplinary advances and based on careful study of manuscript materiality and textuality, this book shows the importance of collections in the development of and access to text and knowledge in early China.
Science and Society in the Sanskrit World contains seventeen essays that cover a kaleidoscopic array of classical Sanskrit scientific disciplines, such as the astral sciences, grammar, jurisprudence, theology, and hermeneutics. The volume foregrounds a unifying theme to Christopher Z. Minkowski’s intellectual oeuvre: that scholars’ scientific endeavors are inseparable from the social worlds that shaped those scholars’ lives.
Contributors are: Anne Blackburn, Johannes Bronkhorst, Jonathan Duquette, Robert Goldman, Setsuro Ikeyama, Stephanie Jamison, Takanori Kusuba, John Lowe, Clemency Montelle, Valters Negribs, Rosalind O'Hanlon, Patrick Olivelle, Deven Patel, Kim Plofker, Frederick Smith, Barbora Sojkova, Thomas Trautmann, Elizabeth Tucker, Anand Venkatkrishnan, and Dominik Wujastyk.