Bøker utgitt av Harvard University, Asia Center

In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming-Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives.

This study links two sets of concerns--the focus of recent studies of the nation on language, culture, education, and race; and the emphasis of diplomatic history on international developments--to show how political, diplomatic, and cultural concerns work together to shape national identity.

Free trade proponent Ayukawa Yoshisuke (1880-1967) was founder of the Nissan conglomerate and leader of the Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation, a linchpin of Japan's efforts to economically exploit its overseas dependencies. Through exploring the reasons for Ayukawa's failure, Iguchi illuminates many of Japan's current economic problems.

This study of Japan's transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and Tokyo policymakers. Smith sheds light on how average Japanese responded to problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.

Hyung Il Pai examines how archaeological finds from Northeast Asia have been used in Korea to construct a myth of state formation emphasizing the ancient development of a pure Korean race that created a civilization rivaling those of China and Japan. He shows that the Korean state was formed far later with influences from throughout Northern Asia.

Focusing on the marginal region of Toyama, on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the Meiji Restoration.

This book, the most detailed and comprehensive study of pao-chuan in any language, studies 34 early examples in order to understand the origins and development of this textual tradition. Although it focuses on content and structure, it also treats the social context of these works, as well as their transmission and ritual use.

W. Wayne Farris has developed the first systematic analysis of early Japanese population, the role of disease in economic development, and the impact of agricultural technology and practices. In doing so, he reinterprets the nature of ritsuryo institutions.

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924-1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of literature. Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves-a search for identity that occurs at the level of the self and society at large.

This study offers a new view of South Korea's transformation since 1960.Focusing on three turning points--the creation of the development state in the 1960s, democratization in 1987, and the 1997 economic crisis--Jongryn Mo and Barry R. Weingast show how Korea sustained growth by resolving crises in favor of greater political and economic openness.

A Sense of Place examines the vast Kanto region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Japan. Using memoirs, letters, travelogues, land registers, and other documents, David Spafford analyzes the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited.

Facing the Monarch examines the role of rhetoric in shaping the dynamic between Chinese ministers and monarchs in the era between the Spring and Autumn period and the later Han dynasty. Essays analyze classical Chinese works to provide fresh perspectives on the impact of political circumstances on modes of expression.

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.

An exception to the rule that the first-rank poets in premodern China were men, the woman poet Li Qingzhao (1084-1150s) occupies a crucial place in Chinese literature. Ronald C. Egan challenges conventional thinking about Li, examining how critics tried to accommodate her to cultural norms from late imperial times into the twentieth century.

The rapid rise and fall of the southern kingdom of Wu inspired many memorials in the former capital city of Suzhou, including the building of temples, shrines, and monuments. Analyzing the history of Wu as recorded in ancient Chinese texts and literature, Olivia Milburn illuminates the cultural endurance of this powerful but short-lived kingdom.

Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue-"Confucianism"-variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This study shows how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess its achievements.

Along with the political and economic reforms that have characterized the post-Mao era in China there has been a potentially revolutionary change in Chinese science and technology. Here sixteen scholars examine various facets of the current science and technology scene, comparing it with the past and speculating about future trends.

These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China's Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch'ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. They culminate in Hart's return visit to Europe with the Pinch'un Mission and his marriage in Northern Ireland.

Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.

Credit for the swift unification of Japan following the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate is usually given to the national leaders. Baxter argues that brilliant leadership at the top is not sufficient to explain how regional separatist tendencies and loyalties to the old lords were overcome in the formation of a nationally unified state.

Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors in the early twentieth century encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by staging tensions between Japan's newly heteronormative culture and the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse.

The earliest anthology of Chinese poetry, the Book of Poems, has served as an ideal of literary perfection and also a major subject of literary criticism since imperial times. Rusk unravels the competitive, mutually influential relationship through which classical and literary scholarship on the poems co-evolved from the Han dynasty to the Qing.

In the late 1800s, Japanese leaders invited Unitarian missionaries to Japan to further modernization. Mohr looks at the debates sparked by the encounter between Unitarianism and Buddhism and considers how the idea of "universal truth" was used by both missionaries and by Japanese intellectuals and religious leaders to promote their own agendas.

In Four Cries of a Gibbon by the late-Ming dynasty playwright Xu Wei, characters move between life and death, and male and female, as they seek to articulate who they truly are. In this first critical study and annotated translation, Kwa considers how Wei's exploration of identity paved the way for further reflection in later fiction and drama.

Strict decrees on the observance of death were part of the myriad laws enacted under the Tokugawa shogunate to control nearly every aspect of Japanese life. Hirai explores how this class of legislation played an integrative part in Japanese society by codifying religious beliefs and customs the Japanese people had cherished for generations.

China's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented explosion in the production of woodblock-printed books. This volume considers what a wide range of late Ming books reveal about their readers' ideas of a pleasurable private life, as well as their orientations toward early modernity and toward traditional Chinese sources of authority.

Practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan's legal modernity in ways the samurai and the state could not. Tracing law regimes from Edo to Meiji, Flaherty shows how the legal profession emerged as a force for change in modern Japan, founding private universities and political parties, and contributing to twentieth-century legal reform.

South Korea was one of the poorest economies on the planet after the Korean War; by the twenty-first century, it had become a middle-income country, home to some of the world's leading industrial corporations. From Miracle to Maturity offers an analysis of Korea's remarkable economic growth and considers whether its economy is now underperforming.

Bossler traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries by examining three critical categories of women: courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives. Bossler illustrates how these groups intersected and interacted with men, influencing the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.