Volume 2 Issue 1, April 2015
Special Issue
Chinese Literature and Visual Culture
edited by Yuan Xingpei and Shang Wei
This special issue is concerned primarily with the literature and visual culture of early modern China (1550–1911). Intending to demonstrate how closely the literary texts and visual media of the early modern era engaged with each other, it focuses on individual cases so as to capture the historical particularities of the literary and visual representations of the time. Concrete case studies allow for examination of selected literary texts and images through their interactions with one another, rather than addressing the relationship between word and image in abstract terms. Contributors illuminate the cultural work that images and words do under specific circumstances, the mechanism of their operations at both visual and linguistic levels, and what these case studies reveal about the culture and society of early modern China.
Table of Contents
Introduction, Shang Wei
The Possibilities and Limits of a Genre: Lyrical Pictures from the Ming
Yuan Xingpei , Allison Bernard
Collecting the Here and Now: Birthday Albums and the Aesthetics of Association in Mid-Ming China
Lihong Liu
Presenting Mortality: Shen Zhou’s Falling Blossoms Project
Peter C. Sturman
Like Not Like: Writing Portraits in The Peony Pavilion
Anne Burkus-Chasson
Voices from the Crimson Clouds Library: Reading Liu Rushi’s (1618–1664) Misty Willows by Moonlit Dike
Hui-Shu Lee
Truth Becomes Fiction when Fiction is True: The Story of the Stone and the Visual Culture of the Manchu Court
Shang Wei
Volume 2 Issue 2, November 2015
Special Issue
The Sound and Sense of Chinese Poetry
edited by Zong-qi Cai
In Chinese poetry, the primacy of sound has long been overlooked. A demonstration of the pivotal roles of sound in various major genres is the primary goal of this special issue. By employing approaches of literary interpretation, statistical analysis, practical criticism, and theoretical inquiry, this collection of ten articles authored by American and Chinese literary scholars and linguists has explored the aural dimensions of Chinese poetry, shown that sound does not merely echo the sense in Chinese poetry, and shed new light on the interplay of sound and sense in one or more particular genres across time. The goal of this issue is to draw more scholarly attention to the primacy of sound in Chinese poetry and contribute to the broader discourse on the sound of poetry/the poetry of sound initiated by scholars of Western poetry.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Primacy of Sound in Chinese Poetry
Zong-qi Cai
Ancient-Style Poetry: Sound and Sense in Reduplicatives and Poetic Rhythms
Sound Symbolism in the Reduplicative Vocabulary of the Shijing
Jonathan Smith
A Discussion of the Principles for the Combination of “Feet” in the Pentasyllabic Shi Genre
Zhao Minli and Benjamin Ridgway
From Ancient- to Recent-Style Poetry: The Long Path toward Tonal Regulation
Tonal Contrast in Early Pentasyllabic Poems: A Quantitative Study of Three Poem Collections
Chenqing Song
On the Origin of Chinese Tonal Prosody: Argumentation from the Case Study of Shen Yue’s Poems
Hongming Zhang
Formation of the Tonal Pattern and Prosodic Transformation of the Pentasyllabic Line in the Datong Reign (535-546) of the Liang
Du Xiaoqin and Li E
The Rhyme Book Culture of Pre-Tang China
Meow Hui Goh
Poetry and Prose: Interaction and Mutual Transformation
Parallel Prose and Spatiotemporal Freedom: A Case for Creative Syntax in “Wucheng fu”
Shengli Feng and Ash Henson
“Prose within the Poem” (Shi zhong you wen): Du Fu’s Creative Breakthrough in the Light of Wugu Narrative Rhythm
Ge Xiaoyin; Jonathan Smith,translator
Guwen (Ancient-Style Prose), Sound, and the History of Chinese Poetics
Chen Yinchiand Paula Varsano
Theoretical Reflections
Sound over Ideograph: the Basis of Chinese Poetic Art
Zong-qi Cai
