- Srngaraprakasa of Bhoja, Part 1,
- Venkatarama Raghavan
- This edition is based on new manuscripts of this important treatise on classical Sanskrit poetics. It was composed by the famous eleventh-century King Bhoja of Malwa (W. India), a patron of traditional learning. The text has never received a complete critical edition. It is important not only because of the theoretical treatment of the erotic sentiment (srngara) in classical Sanskrit texts. It is also a mine of quotations from extant and also from lost Sanskrit and Prakrit poetical texts.
- Hardcover 1999
- Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature
- Tina Lu
- Writers of late imperial fiction and drama were, Lu argues, deeply engaged with questions about the nature of the Chinese empire and of the human community. This book traces how these political questions were addressed in fiction through extreme situations: husbands and wives torn apart in periods of political upheaval, families so disrupted that incestuous encounters become inevitable, times so desperate that people have to sell themselves to be eaten.
- Hardcover 2009
- Alien Kind
- Rania Huntington
- To discuss the supernatural in China is "to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts." Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time.
- Hardcover 2004
- An Early Tibetan Survey of Buddhist Literature
- Edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer
- Edited by Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp
- This volume is a study and edition of Bcom Idan ral gri's (1227-1305) Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od. Likely composed in the last decades of the thirteenth century, this systematic list of Buddhist Sutras, Tantras, Shastras, and related genres translated primarily from Sanskrit and other Indic languages holds an important place in the history of Buddhist literature in Tibet.
- Hardcover 2008
- Beacon Fire and Shooting Star
- Xiaofei Tian
- The Liang dynasty (502-557) was one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and is one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era, exploring not only the literary works themselves but also the processes of literary production and the intricate interactions of religion and literature.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Beauty and the Book
- Ellen Widmer
- This study of Chinese women in the book trade begins with three case studies, each of which probes one facet of the relationship between women and fiction in the early nineteenth century. Building on these case studies, the second half of the book focuses on the many sequels to the Dream of the Red Chamber and the significance of this novel for women. As Ellen Widmer shows, by the end of the century, women became increasingly involved in the novel as critical readers, writers, and editors.
- Hardcover 2006
- A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918-1942
- Donald Gibbs
- Yun-chen Li
- Hardcover 1975
- The Book of Korean Shijo
- Edited and translated by Kevin O'Rourke
- In this anthology of translations of 612 shijo, O'Rourke introduces the English reader to this venerable and witty style of verse. The anthology covers the entire range of shijo production from the tenth century to the modern era.
- Hardcover 2002
- The Clash of Empires
- Lydia H. Liu
- This book brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the invention of "China," "the East," "the West," and the modern notion of "the world" in recent history.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
- Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter
- Gregory Nagy
- View a video of Professor Greg Nagy leading discussion and commentary on one of the greatest epics of all time: The Iliad"
- Hardcover 1974
- Crafting a Collection
- Anna M. Shields
- Compiled in 940 at the court of the kingdom of Shu, the Huajian ji is the earliest extant collection of song lyrics by literati poets. In this book, Anna Shields examines the influence of court culture on the creation of the anthology and the significance of imitation and convention in its lyrics. By illuminating the historical and literary contexts of the anthology, the author aims to situate the Huajian ji within larger questions of Chinese literary history.
- Hardcover 2006
- Critical Aesthetics
- James Dorsey
- Hardcover 2009
- The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta
- Edited and translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls
- Translated by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
- Translated by M. V. Patwardhan
- Hardcover 1990
- Discourses of Seduction
- Hosea Hirata
- If the postmodernist ethical onslaught has led to the demise of literature by exposing its political agenda, if all literature is compromised by its entanglement with power, why does literature's subterranean voice still seduce us into reading? And what is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? In a series of essays on the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, Hosea Hirata visits the primal force of the scandalous to confront the questions raised.
- Hardcover 2005
- Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation
- Edited by David Der-wei Wang
- Edited by Wei Shang
- Focusing on the twin themes of crisis and innovation, the seventeen chapters in this book aim to illuminate the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; to analyze linkages between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and to rethink the "premodernity" of the late Ming and late Qing in the context of the end of the age of modernism.
- Hardcover 2006
- Fu Shan's World
- Qianshen Bai
- For 1,300 years, Chinese calligraphy was based on the elegant art of Wang Xizhi (A.D. 303-361). But the seventeenth-century emergence of a style modeled on the rough, broken epigraphs of ancient bronzes and stone artifacts brought a revolution in calligraphic taste. By the eighteenth century, this led to the formation of the stele school of calligraphy, which continues to shape Chinese calligraphy today. A dominant force in this school was the eminent calligrapher and art theorist Fu Shan (1607-1685). Because his work spans the late Ming-early Qing divide, it is an ideal prism through which to view the transformation in calligraphy.
- Hardcover 2003
- The Goindval Pothis
- Gurinder S. Mann
- Hardcover
- Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China
- Haun Saussy
- "China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"--these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2002
- The Heart of Time
- Sabina Knight
- By examining how narrative strategies reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms, this work 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 twentieth century.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Invention of Li Yu
- Patrick Hanan
- Li Yu, 1610-1680, was a brilliant comic writer and entertainer, a thoroughgoing professional whose life was in his work-plays, stories, a novel, criticism, essays, and poems. Hanan places him in the society of his day, where even his precarious livelihood, his constant search for patronage, did not dampen his versatility, his irreverent wit, or his jocund spirit. Li was an exceptional figure in Chinese culture for two reasons: his disregard of the authority of tradition, and his dedication to the cause of comedy.
- Hardcover 1988
- The Japanization of Modernity
- Rebecca Suter
- Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Korean Singer of Tales
- Marshall Pihl
- P'ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. In the first book-length treatment in English of this remarkable art form, Pihl traces the history of p'ansori from its roots in shamanism and folktales through its nineteenth-century heyday under highly acclaimed masters and discusses its evolution in the twentieth century. After examining the place of p'ansori in popular entertainment and its textual tradition, he analyzes the nature of texts in the repertoire and explains the vocal and rhythmic techniques required to perform them.
- Paperback 2003 / Hardcover
- The Late Tang
- Stephen Owen
- In this continuation of the literary history of the Tang, Stephen Owen analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of styles, genres, and the voices of past poets--a repertoire that would endure.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2009
- Love after The Tale of Genji
- Charo B. D'Etcheverry
- The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji has become the definitive expression of the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of life in the Heian court. But its brilliance has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to critical obscurity. D'Etcheverry calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light upon this undervalued body of work and examining three representative texts as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry
- Stephen Owen
- This study adopts a double approach to the poetry composed between the end of the first century b.c.e. and the third century c.e. It examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged. It also considers how the scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Making of Shinkokinshu
- Robert N. Huey
- In the history of traditional Japanese waka poetry, Shinkokinshu of 1205 is generally regarded as one of the three most important anthologies. The collection--the "New Kokinshu"--is in many ways a neo-classical effort. Reading history backward, scholars have often taken this to be a nostalgia for greatness presumed to have been lost in the wars of the late 1100s. In this detailed study of the origins of Shinkokinshu, the author argues that the compilers of Shinkokinshu instead saw their collection as a "new" beginning, a revitalization and affirmation of courtly traditions, and not a reaction to loss. It is a dynamic collection, full of innovative, challenging poetry--not an elegy for a lost age.
- Hardcover 2002
- Mi-lou
- Stephen Owen
- Hardcover 1989
- Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era
- Edited by Merle Goldman
- One of the most creative and brilliant episodes in modern Chinese history, the cultural and literary flowering that takes the name of the May Fourth Movement, is the subject of this comprehensive and insightful book. This is the first study of modern Chinese literature that shows how China's Confucian traditions were combined with Western influences to create a literature of new values and consciousness for the Chinese people.
- Paperback
- The Naked Gaze
- Carlos Rojas
- This volume focuses on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively.
- Hardcover 2009
- Neo-Confucianism in History
- Peter K. Bol
- The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support.
- Hardcover 2008
- Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts II
- Edited and translated by Gregory G. Maskarinec
- Hardcover 2009
- Off Center
- Masao Miyoshi
- In this provocative study, Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has characterized relations between the two cultures.
- Hardcover 1991 / Paperback 1998
- Out of the Alleyway
- Eve Zimmerman
- In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Zimmerman delves into the writer's literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.
- Hardcover 2008
- Practices of the Sentimental Imagination
- Jonathan E. Zwicker
- The history of the book in nineteenth-century Japan follows a course that resists the simple chronology often used to mark the divide between premodern and modern literary history. By examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Jonathan 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.
- Hardcover 2006
- Rai Mythology
- Karen H. Ebert
- Martin Gaenzle
- Hardcover 2009
- The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
- Wai-yee Li
- The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.
- Hardcover 2008
- Reading Tao Yuanming
- Wendy Swartz
- Tao Yuanming (365?–427), although dismissed as a poet following his death, is now considered one of China’s greatest writers. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history, the mechanisms at work in the reception of his works, and the canonization of Tao himself and of particular readings of his works sheds light on the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Red Brush
- Wilt L. Idema
- Beata Grant
- One of the most exciting recent developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of an extremely rich and diverse tradition of women's writing of the imperial period. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women's writings not only in poetry but in other genres as well, including essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.
- Paperback 2004
- Rig Veda
- Barend Van Nooten
- Gary Holland
- Hardcover
- Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China
- Wei Shang
- Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars) is more than a landmark in the history of the Chinese novel. This eighteenth-century work, which was deeply embedded in the intellectual and literary discourses of its time, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. Wu Jingzi's (1701-54) ironic portrait of literati life was unprecedented in its comprehensive treatment of the degeneration of mores, the predicaments of official institutions, and the Confucian elite's futile struggle to reassert moral and cultural authority.
- Hardcover 2003
- Sanskrit Grammar
- William Dwight Whitney
- Hardcover
- Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyakara's Treasury
- Edited and translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls
- In this rich collection of Sanskrit verse, the late Daniel Ingalls provides English readers with a wide variety of poetry from the vast anthology of an eleventh-century Buddhist scholar. Although the style of poetry presented here originated at the royal courts, Ingalls shows how it was adapted to all aspects of life, and came to address issues as diverse as love, sex, heroes, nature, and peace. More than thirty years after its original publication, Sanskrit Poetry continues to be the main resource for all interested in this multifaceted and elegant tradition.
- Paperback 2000 / Hardcover
- Saunakiya Caturadhyayika
- Edited and translated by Madhav M. Deshpande
- A detailed discussion by the editor complements this critical edition and translation of the phonetical treatise (Pratisakhya) of the Saunaka Samhita, one of two versions of the second oldest Indian text, the Saunaka Atharvaveda. The 19th century edition of the text by W.D. Whitney has long been out of date; this reevaluation provides insights into early grammatical thought and helps to re-establish the textual tradition of the Atharvaveda.
- Hardcover 1998
- Stri
- Kevin McGrath
- This book is a study of heroic femininity as it appears in the epic Mahabharata, and focuses particularly on the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother, on how these women speak, and on the kinship groups and varying marital systems that surround them.
- Paperback 2009
- Sublime Voices
- Christopher Bolton
- Hardcover 2009
- Taiwan's Imagined Geography
- Emma Jinhua Teng
- Until 300 years ago, the Chinese considered Taiwan a "land beyond the seas," a "ball of mud" inhabited by "naked and tattooed savages." The incorporation of this island into the Qing empire in the seventeenth century and its evolution into a province by the late nineteenth century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of the Chinese domain. By viewing Taiwan-China relations as a product of the history of Qing expansionism, the author contributes to our understanding of current political events in the region.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
- The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir
- Lawrence J. McCrea
- Hardcover 2009
- Through a Forest of Chancellors
- Anne Burkus-Chasson
- Hardcover 2009
- Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature
- Edited by Wilt L. Idema
- Edited by Wai-yee Li
- Edited by Ellen Widmer
- The collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China were traumatic experiences for Chinese intellectuals, not only because of the many decades of destructive warfare but also because of the adjustments necessary to life under a foreign regime. The twelve chapters in this volume and the introductory essays on early Qing poetry, prose, and drama understand the writings of this era wholly or in part as attempts to recover from or transcend the trauma of the transition years.
- Hardcover 2006
- Uchida Hyakken
- Rachel DiNitto
- The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres. This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Uses of Memory
- Timothy J. Van Compernolle
- The writer Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) has been described as a consummate stylist of classical prose, whose command of the linguistic and rhetorical riches of the premodern tradition might suggest that her writings are relics of the past with no concern for the problems of modern life. Timothy Van Compernolle investigates the social dimensions of Ichiyo's imagination and argues that she reworked the Japanese literary tradition in order to understand and critique the emerging modernity of the Meiji period.
- Hardcover 2006
- When Our Eyes No Longer See
- Gregory Golley
- As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
- Hardcover 2008
- Words Well Put
- Graham Sanders
- As traced in Words Well Put, 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 and to identify the sources and exemplars of that complexity.
- Hardcover 2006
- Worldly Stage
- Sophie Volpp
- The goal of Worldly Stage is to show how the theater acquired the figurative power to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. Conceptions of theatrical spectatorship, Sophie Volpp argues, helped shape a discourse on social spectatorship that suggested how a discerning person might evaluate the performance of status.
- Hardcover
- Worrying about China
- Gloria Davies
- What can we do about China? Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2009
- Writing Home
- Stephen Dodd
- This book examines the development of Japanese 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. The book concentrates on four authors who typify this trend: Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki T'son, Sat' Haruo, and Shiga Naoya.
- Hardcover 2005
- Writing and Materiality in China
- Edited by Judith T. Zeitlin
- Edited by Lydia H. Liu
- Ellen Widmer, With
- Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China's literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.
- Hardcover 2003
- The Yavanajataka of Sphujidhvaja
- Edited and translated by David Pingree
- Hardcover 1978