scholarly journals Vernacular “Fiction” and Celestial Script: A Daoist Manual for the Use of Water Margin

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 518
Author(s):  
Meulenbeld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Vernacular Fiction ◽  
Shuihu Zhuan ◽  
Water Margin ◽  
Religious Elements ◽  
Initial Focus

This article maps out a sphere of ritual practice that recognizably serves as a framework for the famous Ming dynasty (1368–1644) vernacular narrative Water Margin (水滸傳 Shuihu zhuan). By establishing a set of primary referents that are ritual in nature, I question the habit of applying the modern category of “literary fiction” in a universalizing, secular way, marginalizing or metaphorizing religious elements. I argue that literary analysis can only be fruitful if it is done within the parameters of ritual. Although I tie the story’s ritual framework to specific Daoist procedures for imprisoning demonic spirits throughout the article, my initial focus is on a genre of revelatory writing known as “celestial script” (天書 tianshu). This type of script is given much attention at important moments in the story and it is simultaneously known from Daoist ritual texts. I show a firm link between Water Margin and the uses of “celestial script” by presenting a nineteenth century Daoist ordination manual that contains “celestial script” for each of Water Margin’s 108 heroic protagonists.

RECLAIMING THE MARGINS: SEITA TANSŌ'S SUIKODEN HIHYŌKAI AND THE POETICS OF CROSS-CULTURAL INFLUENCE

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-215
Author(s):  
William C. Hedberg
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Edo Period ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Vernacular Fiction ◽  
Colloquial Language ◽  
Ethical Content ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Shuihu Zhuan ◽  
Water Margin

This article focuses on the literary criticism of the Edo-period scholar, Seita Tansō (1719–1785). Although a historian by vocation, Tansō additionally lectured extensively on the Chinese vernacular novel, Shuihu zhuan (Jp. Suikoden, En. The Water Margin). While earlier generations of Chinese fiction aficionados in Japan had also discussed Shuihu zhuan, early eighteenth-century analysis was primarily limited to philological explication—a task necessitated by the extensive use of colloquial language in the novel. In contrast to this tradition of philological exegesis, Tansō turned his attention to the ethical content and literary structure of Shuihu zhuan. Tansō was heavily influenced by the writing of the Chinese fiction commentator Jin Shengtan (1608–1661), and in this article, I discuss Tansō's use of Jin's fiction criticism in the construction of his own interpretation of the novel. I argue that the dissemination of Chinese novels in Edo-period Japan cannot be discussed without an understanding of Japanese engagement with Chinese narrative theory, and I identify Seita Tansō as an important figure in a transition from philological to more purely narratological analysis of Chinese vernacular fiction.

‘The Wuding Editions’: Printing, Power, and Vernacular Fiction in the Ming Dynasty

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott W. Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Vernacular Fiction ◽  
Shuihu Zhuan ◽  
The Ming Dynasty

The vernacular fiction ‘novel’ is a genre typically associated with the explosion of commercial printing activity that occurred in the late sixteenth century. However, by that time, representative works such as theShuihu zhuanandSanguo yanyihad already been in print for several decades. Moreover, those early print editions were printed not by commercial entities but rather the elite of the Jiajing court. In order to better understand the genre as a print phenomenon, this paper explores the publishing output of one of those elites: Guo Xun (1475-1542), Marquis of Wuding. In addition to vernacular fiction, Guo printed a number of other types of books as well. This paper examines the entirety of his publishing activities in order to better contextualize the vernacular novel at this early stage in its life in print.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Compulsion to Repeat

2017 ◽  
pp. 9-35
Author(s):  
Mavis Reimer ◽  
Deanna England ◽  
Melanie Dennis Unrau ◽  
Nyala Ali
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Series Fiction ◽  
Compulsion To Repeat

Beginning of the article: There is a curious gap in the scholarship on texts for young people: while series fiction has been an important stream of publishing for children and adolescents at least since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the scholarship on these texts has not been central to the development of theories on and criticism of texts for young people. The focus of scholarship is much more likely to be on stand-alone, high-quality texts of literary fiction.

The Psychology of Victorian Buddhism and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-259
Author(s):  
Deanna K. Kreisel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Religious Elements

Deanna K. Kreisel, “The Psychology of Victorian Buddhism and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim” (pp. 227–259) This essay demonstrates that Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) engages deeply with several aspects of Buddhist thought that were also of central concern to nineteenth-century British psychology. It describes several central tenets of Buddhism as understood by Victorian exegetes, paying particular attention to the ways this discourse became surprisingly approbatory over the course of the century. It also performs close readings of three key passages in Kipling’s novel dealing with identity, will, and self-discipline that illuminate the author’s understanding of the subtleties of Buddhist thought. Its attention to the ways in which Kipling’s novel engages Asian religious practice, particularly the “esoteric” practices of meditation and trance, complicates an entrenched reading of the novel as championing British triumphalism; it does so by challenging earlier interpretations of the religious elements in Kim as constituting straightforward evidence for the novel’s endorsement of the imperial project.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 152-154
Author(s):  
Arne Höcker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Institutional Authority ◽  
Legal Decision Making ◽  
The One ◽  
Legal Judgments

This chapter explains that while literary texts in the nineteenth century continued the convention of referencing historical cases, they did so in order to question institutional authority and to criticize the epistemological foundations and the legitimacy of legal judgments informed by psychological narrative. A scene from Hoffmann's “The Story of Serapion” in The Serapion Brethren may exemplify this new status of literary fiction in the nineteenth century. Hoffmann's rigorous rejection of medical authority in the analysis of states of mind for the purpose of legal decision making shows his deep concern about the predictability of the law and the dangers of compromising legal authority with knowledge based on philosophical speculation. Literary fiction, according to Hoffmann's rendering of romantic authorship, develops in opposition to psychological rationality and its claim to objectivity: poetical talent is based on methodological madness. This model of authorship, on the one hand, assigns to literary authors a special ability to depict questionable states of mind, and on the other hand locates this ability in authors' own special psychological intuition.

scholarly journals The differentiation between elegance and popularity in the orthography of popular literature of the Ming Dynasty and its causes

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Zhang Meilan ◽  
Zhan Hao
Keyword(s):  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Cultural Awareness ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Modern Fiction ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Journey To The West ◽  
Water Margin ◽  
The Ming Dynasty

Through examination of variants in two versions of Jinpingmei, three versions of Water Margin, two versions of Journey to the West, and between relevant sections of Qingpingshantang Scripts, Ancient and Modern Fiction, Jingshi Tongyan, and Amazing Stories, the existence of two trends of elegance and popularity in the orthography of different versions and literary works may be detected. Those texts with a more elegant character have been largely influenced by a strategy of standardized orthography, which is closely related to the creation purpose, knowledge, and cultural awareness of the authors, the willingness of booksellers to produce and sell such works, and their target consumers and readership. The differentiation between elegance and popularity in the character of literary works truly reflects the divergence of different texts within different social strata, which is not only a linguistic and philological question, but also a sociological one.

DEATH BECOMES HER: ON THE PROGRESSIVE POTENTIAL OF VICTORIAN MOURNING

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 595-620
Author(s):  
Rebecca N. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Golden Jubilee ◽  
Progressive Potential ◽  
Black Rectangle

On the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria was depicted in a woodcut by William Nicholson that was to become extremely popular (Figure 1). So stout that her proportions approach those of a cube, the Queen is dressed from top to toe in her usual black mourning attire, the white of her gloved hands punctuating the otherwise nearly solid black rectangle of her body. Less than thirty years later, another simple image of a woman in black would prove to be equally iconic: the lithe, narrow column of Chanel's black dress (Figure 2). Comparing the dresses depicted in the two images – the first a visual reminder of the desexualized stolidity of Victorian fidelity, the second image an example of women's burgeoning social and sexual liberation – might lead one to conclude that the only thing they have in common is the color black. And yet, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion historians suggest that Victorian mourning is the direct antecedent of the sexier fashions that followed. Jill Fields writes, for example, that “the move to vamp black became possible because the growing presence of black outerwear for women in the nineteenth century due to extensive mourning rituals merged with the growing sensibility that dressing in black was fashionable” (144). Valerie Mendes is more direct: “Traditional mourning attire blazed a trail for the march of fashionable black and the little black dress” (9). These are provocative claims given that most scholarly accounts of Victorian mourning attire – whether from the perspective of literary analysis, fashion history or theory, or social history or theory – offer no indication that such progressive possibilities were inherent in widows’ weeds. Instead, those accounts focus almost exclusively on chasteness and piety, qualities required of the sorrowful widow, as the only message communicated by her attire: “Widows’ mourning clothes announced the ongoing bonds of fidelity, dependence, and grieving that were expected to tie women to their dead husbands for at least a year” (Bradbury 289). The disparity in the two accounts raises the question: how could staid, cumbersome black Victorian mourning attire lead to dresses understood to embrace sexuality and mobility?

The Outside of the Inside: Blackness and the Remaking of Canadian Institutional Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-265
Author(s):  
Karina Vernon
Keyword(s):  
Classroom Practice ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Canadian Universities ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Black Canadian ◽  
Person Account ◽  
Teaching Learning

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

scholarly journals The deposition of bronzes at Swiss lakeshore settlements: new investigations

Antiquity ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (330) ◽  
pp. 1298-1311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktoria Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Shallow Water ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Special Places

The famous lakeside sites of Switzerland have long been known for their pile dwellings and their massive quantities of Late Bronze Age metalwork. On the most recent excavations, the bronzes have been mapped in situ, allowing comparison with assemblages from dryland sites and rivers, as well as providing a context for the nineteenth-century collections. The pile dwellings emerge as special places where depositions of selected bronze objects in groups or as single discards, comparable to those usually found in dryland deposits or in rivers, accumulated in the shallow water during a unique 250-year spell of ritual practice.

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