Bøker utgitt av Harvard University, Asia Center

Seth Jacobowitz rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture, presenting the first systematic study of the ways that media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

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.

Ellen Widmer examines the writings of a literary family whose works embodied shifting attitudes toward women in late Qing China. She illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the preceding period, the synchronic interplay of genres during the family's lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with other regions.

In Northern Song China, reform-minded statesmen sought to remove the tension between the Confucian Classics and statist ideals of "big government." Jaeyoon Song illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage of classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.

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.

The third century CE-the Jian'an era or Three Kingdoms-holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and events also inspired works of art throughout Chinese history. Xiaofei Tian examines the interface of these two nostalgias.

Michael A. Fuller's innovative textbook for learning classical Chinese poetry moves beyond the traditional anthology of poems translated into English and instead brings readers-including those with no knowledge of Chinese-as close as possible to the texture of the poems in their original language.

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.

The Anime Boom in the United States is a comprehensive and empirically grounded study of the expansion of anime marketing and sales into the United States. It explores the transnational networks of anime production and marketing while also investigating the cultural and artistic processes the art form inspired.

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.

Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao outlines the evolution of musical performance in early China, first within and then ultimately away from the socio-religious context of ancestor worship. The focus of this study is on excavated texts; it is the first to use both bronze and bamboo narratives to show the evolution of a single ritual practice.

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.

Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious, social, and art historians, this book seeks to recover the motivations behind the creation of religious art, including temple buildings, sculpture, and wall paintings.

As descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) and his son Teika (1162-1244), the heirs of the Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage spanning over eight centuries. Carter combines family history, literary criticism, and historical research in a coherent narrative tracking the evolution of the Reizei Way.

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.

The vision of poetic competence evolved for over a millennium from calculated performances of inherited words to sincere passionate outbursts to displays of verbal wit combining calculation with the appearance of spontaneity. This book tells the story of the development of poetic competence to uncover the complexity of the concept.

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.

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.

Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, Steven B. Miles describes the circulation of people through one of the world's great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

Bannermen Tales is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive study of zidishu-a popular storytelling genre created by the Manchus in early eighteenth-century Beijing. With original translations, musical score, and numerous illustrations of hand-copied and printed texts, this study opens a new window into Qing literature.

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.

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.

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.

W. Puck Brecher overturns standard narratives of wartime Japan's racial attitudes, focusing on the experiences of Western civilians rather than enemy POWs in Japan. His bold thesis is borne out by a broad mosaic of stories of police harassment, suspicion, relocation, starvation, internment, and torture, as well as extraordinary acts of charity.

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.

Zhao Ma explores lower-class women's struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife in Beijing from 1937 to 1949. He shows how the everyday survival tactics they devised allowed them to subtly deflect, subvert, and "escape without leaving" powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics.

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.