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Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture provides a textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Study of drum ballads opens up new perspectives in Chinese literature and history and offers a new paradigm that will interest scholars of cultural history, literature, legal history, and popular culture.

In this groundbreaking study, Maram Epstein identifies filial piety as the dominant expression of love in Qing dynasty texts. By decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, Orthodox Passions calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.

Imaginative Mapping analyzes how intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras used specific features and aspects of the landscape to represent their idea of Japan and produce a narrative of Japan as a cultural community. Nobuko Toyosawa argues that the circulation spatial narratives allowed readers to imagine the broader conceptual space of Japan.

Aesthetic Life is a study of modern Japan, engaging the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the "beautiful woman" (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

How has Confucius, quintessentially and symbolically Chinese, been received throughout Japanese history? The Worship of Confucius in Japan provides the first overview of the richly documented and colorful Japanese version of the East Asian ritual to venerate Confucius, known in Japan as the sekiten.

Drawing on vernacular Vietnamese and classical Chinese sources, Ang identifies the different ways two leading statesmen of the time employed literature to transform the frontier region. This book captures a historical moment of overlapping visions, frustrated schemes, and contested desires on the Mekong plains.

Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century in the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung).

Tian, or Heaven, had been used in China since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god. Examining excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han-dynasty artisans transformed various notions of Heaven-as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky-into pictorial entities, not by what they looked at, but by what they looked into.

This detailed biography of Japan's postwar prime minister was favorably received in the United States and has sold widely in translation in Japan.

Founded in the 1820s, the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) was a premier academy of its time. Miles examines the discourse that portrayed it as having radically altered Guangzhou literati culture. He argues that the academy's location embedded it in social settings that determined who used its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.

Korean Buddhists, despite living under colonial rule, reconfigured sacred objects, festivals, urban temples, propagation-and even their own identities-to modernize and elevate Korean Buddhism. By focusing on six case studies, this book highlights the centrality of transnational relationships in the transformation of colonial Korean Buddhism.

In the first comprehensive study of Guo Moruo in English, Pu Wang explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer, Mao Zedong's last poetic interlocutor, a Marxist historian, president of China's Academy of Sciences, and translator of Goethe's Faust.

Chieko Nakajima tells the story of China's unfolding modernity, exploring changing ideas, practices, and systems related to health and body in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai. She explains how local customs fashioned and constrained public health and, in turn, how hygienic modernity helped shape local cultures and behavior.

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.

Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals' visions of national rejuvenation. Mingwei Song combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman.

Halle O'Neal unpacks jeweled pagoda mandala paintings and their revolutionary entwining of word and image to reveal crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art-including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.

Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation, which was introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century. Anne Reinhardt illuminates both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China's experience, its continuities with colonialism, and its links to global processes.

Anna Andreeva challenges the twentieth-century narrative of Shinto as an unbroken, monolithic tradition. By studying how and why religious practitioners affiliated with different religious institutions responded to esoteric Buddhism's teachings, this book demonstrates that kami worship in medieval Japan was a result of complex negotiations.

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.

By the late eleventh century the Song court no longer dominated production of information about itself. Hilde De Weert demonstrates how the growing involvement of the literati in publishing such information altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the Chinese imperial period.

Stigmatized throughout Japanese history as outcastes, the burakumin are contemporary Japan's largest minority. In this study of youths from two different communities, Christopher Bondy explores how individuals navigate their social world, demonstrating the ways in which people make conscious decisions about disclosing a stigmatized identity.

Knight describes modern Chinese fiction's unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the 20th century.

Elizabeth Kindall's definitive study elucidates the context for the paintings of Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673) and identifies geo-narrative as a distinct landscape-painting tradition lauded for its naturalistic immediacy, experiential topography, and dramatic narratives of moral persuasion, class identification, and biographical commemoration.

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.

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.

Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were female figures in late nineteenth century domestic novels. This study disrupts the canonical account of a non-gendered, linear progress toward modern Korean selfhood and examines translation's impact on Korea's construction of modern gender roles.

By tracing Korean-educated agents' efforts to articulate the vernacular nomenclature of medicine over time, Soyoung Suh examines the limitations and possibilities of creating a mode of "Koreanness" in medicine-and the Korean manifestation of cultural and national identities.

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.

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 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.