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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines responses of Japanese authors to the aesthetic transformation of Tokyo influenced by the activities of Japanese advertisers in the early 20th century. Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of "mass media."

As a study of Confucian government in action, this intellectual history describes a mode of public policy discussion far less dominated by the Confucian scriptures than expected. It offers a detailed view of members of an ostensibly Confucian government pursuing divergent agendas around the question of "state or merchant?"

The collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China were traumatic experiences for Chinese intellectuals. The 12 chapters in this volume and the introductory essays on early Qing poetry, prose, and drama understand the writings of this era wholly or in part as attempts to recover from or transcend the trauma of the transition years.

By examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Zwicker traces a genealogy of the literary field across a long nineteenth century: one that stresses continuities between the generic conventions of early modern fiction and the modern novel.

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.

Movements of people-through migration, exile, and diaspora-are central to understanding power relationships in Japan 900-1400. But what of more literary moves: texts with abrupt genre leaps or poetic figures that flatten distances? Terry Kawashima examines what happens when both types of tropes-literal travels and literary shifts-coexist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902-1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s.

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.

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.

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.

Japan's "merchant capital" in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial center into the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyo's. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular literature and cinema-as well as contemporary radio, television, music, and comedy-from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of the Northeast Tohoku region of Japan to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan's shifting self-images since World War II.

Revolutionary Waves analyzes the crowd in the Chinese cultural and political imagination and its global resonances by delving into a wide range of fiction, philosophy, poetry, and psychological studies-raising questions about the promise and peril of community as communion and reimagining collective life in China's post-socialist present.

Give and Take offers a new history of government in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), one that focuses on ordinary subjects: merchants, artisans, villagers, and people at the margins of society. Maren Ehlers explores how high and low people negotiated and collaborated with each other as they addressed the problem of poverty in early modern Japan.

Korea's financial development has been a tale of liberalization and opening but the new system has failed to steer the country away from financial crises. This study analyzes the changes in the financial system and finds that financial liberalization has contributed little to grow and stabilize the Korean economy.

This book is about the losers of the Meiji Restoration and the supporters who promoted their legacy. Using sources ranging from essays by former Tokugawa supporters like Fukuzawa Yukichi to postwar film and "lost decade" manga, Michael Wert shows how shifting portrayals of Restoration losers have influenced the formation of national history.