Bøger i Harvard East Asian Monographs serien

Dancing the Dharma examines the theory and practice of allegory by exploring a select group of medieval Japanese noh plays and treatises. Understanding noh's allegorical structure and paying attention to the localized historical context for individual plays are key to recovering their original function as political and religious allegories.

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).

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.

We live in a world shaped by secularism-the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from public political, social, and economic realms. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities.

Japan has long wrestled with the memories of World War II. Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere.

A Third Way tells the story of Deng Xiaoping's experimentation with export-led development inspired by Lenin's New Economic Policy and the economic reforms of Eastern Europe and Asia. This book provides important new insights about the crucial period of the 1980s and how it paved the way for China's transformation into a global economic superpower.

Drawing on a decade of research, Erin Brightwell analyzes eight Mirrors and related medieval Japanese texts recounting the history of that time and place. Downplayed and obscured by previous scholars, the mirrors emerge as a once-dominant genre of historical writing-a means by which authors brought order to the chaos of the period.

In Wings for the Rising Sun, scholar and former airline pilot Jurgen Melzer tells the history of Japanese aviation as a story of international cooperation, competition, and conflict. He details how Japan absorbed technologies from abroad, fostered public enthusiasm for aviation at home, and eventually crafted boldly original flying machines.

With the ascension of a new emperor and the dawn of the Reiwa Era, Kenneth J. Ruoff expands upon and updates The People's Emperor, his study of the monarchy's role as a political, societal, and cultural institution in contemporary Japan.

Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), a historical tale that covers 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings of late Heian society, a golden age of Japanese court literature.

Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema's persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Lewis offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the "age of the mass society" in Japan.

The central argument of this study of the development of a communications network linking the far-flung parts of the Japanese imperium is that modern telecommunications not only served to connect these territories but, more important, made it possible for the Japanese to envision an integrated empire in Asia.

Assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) - commonly called the Tokyo trial - established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This title explores some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions.

One Belt One Road argues that the largest global infrastructure development program in history is not the centralized and systematic project that many assume. Rather, Eyck Freymann suggests, the campaign aims to build the cult of Chinese President Xi Jinping while exporting an ancient model of patronage and tribute.

Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture. Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity.

In Varieties of State Regulation, Yukyung Yeo explores how the Chinese central party-state continues to oversee the most strategic sectors of its economy, and how the form of central state control varies considerably across leading industrial sectors, depending on the dominant mode of state ownership, conception of control, and governing structure.

In the early 20th century, China began to import and then to manufacture thousands of consumer goods. Politicians feared trade deficits. Intellectuals feared loss of national sovereignty. And manufacturers wondered how they could survive a flood of cheap imports. Gerth argues that the responses of these groups helped foster modern nationalism.

Earthquake Children is the first book to examine the origins of modern Japan's infrastructure of resilience. Janet Borland vividly demonstrates that Japan's contemporary culture of disaster preparedness-and its people's ability to respond calmly in times of emergency-are the results of learned and practiced behaviors inspired by earlier tragedies.

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.

Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as mere propaganda, not only was liked in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. Considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art from the point of view of its longue duree, Mittler suggests that it built on a tradition of earlier art works, which allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory.

Jun Uchida draws on previously unused materials in multi-language archives to uncover the obscured history of the Japanese civilians who settled in Korea between 1876 and 1945, with particular focus on the first generation of "pioneers" between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated Japan's colonial presence on the Korean peninsula.

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting chronicles the life of a modern art form. In the late 1910s Chinese painters began working outdoors. They also adopted linear perspective and Cartesian optics. Yi Gu reflects on the complex interaction of local and Western aesthetics within the new form and on the nature of visual modernity in China.

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown focuses on a Chinese immigrant community in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. It tells the story of how Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state during periods of war and peace.

Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organization, and tactics from Japan's early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai.

Forty lessons introducing students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edith Sarra radically rethinks the Tale of Genji by focusing on the figure of the house-both the narrative's images of aristocratic mansions and its representation of their inhabitants. Unreal Houses opens new perspectives on the architectonics of the Genji and the feminine milieu that midwifed what has been called the world's first novel.