Maram Epstein - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Maram Epstein
The Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 1, 2005
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2002
... Although the proponents of these two beau-ties may be engaged in a debate whether Lin Daiyu&a... more ... Although the proponents of these two beau-ties may be engaged in a debate whether Lin Daiyu's emotive and quick self-expressive wit or ... sense of this radical shift in attitude toward women and the feminine during this crucial period in the development of fiction aesthetics. ...
Nan nü, 1999
Woven into the structure of the Dream of the Red Chamber is an exploration of the self-expressive... more Woven into the structure of the Dream of the Red Chamber is an exploration of the self-expressive values associated with the late imperial cult of qing and an explicit warning about the self-destructive potential of desire. Rather than being rooted in biological sex, Cao Xueqin's polysemous use of gender reflects the competing visions of Confucian orthodoxy and the cult of qing. This paper analyzes the structural and ideological values associated with masculine and feminine in Dream to argue that manipulation of gendered identities was an explicit aspect of the poetics of eighteenth-century xiaoshuo fiction.
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from... more This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from male-authored xiaoshuo fiction as well as earlier literary tanci novels. This case study discusses Zaisheng yuan as a key text in an affective archive of narrative works written by women that provides insights into how elite women mentally negotiated the social and ideological expectations that informed their lives. In addition to looking at how women authors rewrote the conventions associated with scholar-beauty romances, the chastity cult, and the gendered symbols associated with proper order, this article discusses tanci novels as a unique outlet for women's explorations of autonomous will (zhi 志) and imaginings of emotional justice.
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2013
China Journal, Jul 1, 2009
True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China, by Weijing Lu. Palo Alto: Stan... more True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China, by Weijing Lu. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008. xviii + 345 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover). Weijing Lu's True to Her Word does an excellent job of placing the phenomenon of faithful maidenhood (zhennu) in its late-imperial context. It discusses the practice from the perspectives of the changing tastes for moral extremism fostered during the fall of the Ming, the motivations of the girls and women themselves, and ideological debates. The morality of unmarried girls going against their parents' wishes and swearing lifelong commitment to dead fiances whom they had never met or, even more extreme, deciding to follow them in death, was widely debated in late-imperial China. In analyzing the choice to become a faithful maiden from the perspective of women's agency, this book follows the work of Dorothy Ko on footbinding (Cinderella 's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, 2005), and Janet Theiss on suicide (Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China, 2004) in providing an important revision of the May 4th construction of women as victims of patriarchal Confucian ideology. As Lu demonstrates, faithful maidens knowingly chose to martyr themselves in order to uphold a moral value that held a greater social meaning than their individual lives, and in so doing both established glorious reputations for themselves at the local and imperial levels and sustained the ideological power of the chastity cult. The frequency with which these women and girls insisted on moving to their dead fiances' household also puts to rest the speculation that chastity maidens were trying to resist marriage (p. 13). True to Her Word sets itself apart from most works of late-imperial Chinese history, which treat the late-imperial period as a long continuum, by showing how the Ming/Qing divide had a significant impact on the development of a distinct women's culture. It has long been acknowledged that late-imperial forms of the chastity cult emerged during the Yuan dynasty and the early years of the Ming as a Han reaction to the barbarian marriage practices promoted by the Mongol court. Lu argues that the ethnic and political crises marked by the fall of the Song and Ming courts to ethnic Others created unique opportunities for elite daughters to define what it meant to be Chinese and to defend the supremacy of their native culture and family learning (p. 7). These periods of national crisis raised the metaphorical power of the image of the faithful maiden, as she not only came to represent an expression of individual virtue but became a means for the male literati who honored her to express their own political resolve and faith in Han ethical superiority. Another significant influence on the development of the faithful maiden cult was the changing taste for dramatic, novel and violent representations of virtue during the second half of the Ming. Although Lu links this new culture of virtue to the political upheavals and political moralism of the second half of the Ming (p. 8), she would also have done well to say more about how the spread of print culture influenced both the individual performances of virtue and their representation. …
China Review International, 2002
China Review International, 1996
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2009
ABSTRACT
Comparative Literature, 1999
Preface Abbreviations Introduction: traditional Chinese fiction commentary in context Part I. A B... more Preface Abbreviations Introduction: traditional Chinese fiction commentary in context Part I. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction Commentary: 1. Mr. Pingdian: Jin Shengtan and the Shuihu zhuan 2. Dealing with Jin Shengtan and the rest of the 'Four Masterworks' 3. Decline and revival Part II. Making Room for Fiction: 4. Creating implied authors and readers 5. Liberating fiction from history 6. Liberating fiction from 'reality' Part III. From What to Who: The Turn Away from Plot: 7. From plot-centered to character-centered narratives 8. Relational characterization and ambiguos characters Part IV. How to Write the Chinese Novel: 9. Fiction criticism and how the story is told 10. Articulating the parts Part V. Four Solutions to the Challenge of Commentary: 11. Auto-commentary: the Xiyou bu and the Shuihu houzhuan 12. Commentator-narrators: Li Yu, Ding Yaokang, and Wen Kang 13. Latent commentary: the Rulin waishi 14. Everything all at once: the Honglou meng Works cited Glossary-Index.
The Journal of Asian Studies, Oct 29, 2007
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2009
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, Apr 1, 2023
This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from... more This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from male-authored xiaoshuo fiction as well as earlier literary tanci novels. This case study discusses Zaisheng yuan as a key text in an affective archive of narrative works written by women that provides insights into how elite women mentally negotiated the social and ideological expectations that informed their lives. In addition to looking at how women authors rewrote the conventions associated with scholar-beauty romances, the chastity cult, and the gendered symbols associated with proper order, this article discusses tanci novels as a unique outlet for women's explorations of autonomous will (zhi 志) and imaginings of emotional justice.
Harvard University Asia Center eBooks, Jan 15, 2019
Harvard University Asia Center eBooks, Jan 15, 2019
The Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 1, 2005
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2002
... Although the proponents of these two beau-ties may be engaged in a debate whether Lin Daiyu&a... more ... Although the proponents of these two beau-ties may be engaged in a debate whether Lin Daiyu's emotive and quick self-expressive wit or ... sense of this radical shift in attitude toward women and the feminine during this crucial period in the development of fiction aesthetics. ...
Nan nü, 1999
Woven into the structure of the Dream of the Red Chamber is an exploration of the self-expressive... more Woven into the structure of the Dream of the Red Chamber is an exploration of the self-expressive values associated with the late imperial cult of qing and an explicit warning about the self-destructive potential of desire. Rather than being rooted in biological sex, Cao Xueqin's polysemous use of gender reflects the competing visions of Confucian orthodoxy and the cult of qing. This paper analyzes the structural and ideological values associated with masculine and feminine in Dream to argue that manipulation of gendered identities was an explicit aspect of the poetics of eighteenth-century xiaoshuo fiction.
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from... more This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from male-authored xiaoshuo fiction as well as earlier literary tanci novels. This case study discusses Zaisheng yuan as a key text in an affective archive of narrative works written by women that provides insights into how elite women mentally negotiated the social and ideological expectations that informed their lives. In addition to looking at how women authors rewrote the conventions associated with scholar-beauty romances, the chastity cult, and the gendered symbols associated with proper order, this article discusses tanci novels as a unique outlet for women's explorations of autonomous will (zhi 志) and imaginings of emotional justice.
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2013
China Journal, Jul 1, 2009
True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China, by Weijing Lu. Palo Alto: Stan... more True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China, by Weijing Lu. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008. xviii + 345 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover). Weijing Lu's True to Her Word does an excellent job of placing the phenomenon of faithful maidenhood (zhennu) in its late-imperial context. It discusses the practice from the perspectives of the changing tastes for moral extremism fostered during the fall of the Ming, the motivations of the girls and women themselves, and ideological debates. The morality of unmarried girls going against their parents' wishes and swearing lifelong commitment to dead fiances whom they had never met or, even more extreme, deciding to follow them in death, was widely debated in late-imperial China. In analyzing the choice to become a faithful maiden from the perspective of women's agency, this book follows the work of Dorothy Ko on footbinding (Cinderella 's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, 2005), and Janet Theiss on suicide (Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China, 2004) in providing an important revision of the May 4th construction of women as victims of patriarchal Confucian ideology. As Lu demonstrates, faithful maidens knowingly chose to martyr themselves in order to uphold a moral value that held a greater social meaning than their individual lives, and in so doing both established glorious reputations for themselves at the local and imperial levels and sustained the ideological power of the chastity cult. The frequency with which these women and girls insisted on moving to their dead fiances' household also puts to rest the speculation that chastity maidens were trying to resist marriage (p. 13). True to Her Word sets itself apart from most works of late-imperial Chinese history, which treat the late-imperial period as a long continuum, by showing how the Ming/Qing divide had a significant impact on the development of a distinct women's culture. It has long been acknowledged that late-imperial forms of the chastity cult emerged during the Yuan dynasty and the early years of the Ming as a Han reaction to the barbarian marriage practices promoted by the Mongol court. Lu argues that the ethnic and political crises marked by the fall of the Song and Ming courts to ethnic Others created unique opportunities for elite daughters to define what it meant to be Chinese and to defend the supremacy of their native culture and family learning (p. 7). These periods of national crisis raised the metaphorical power of the image of the faithful maiden, as she not only came to represent an expression of individual virtue but became a means for the male literati who honored her to express their own political resolve and faith in Han ethical superiority. Another significant influence on the development of the faithful maiden cult was the changing taste for dramatic, novel and violent representations of virtue during the second half of the Ming. Although Lu links this new culture of virtue to the political upheavals and political moralism of the second half of the Ming (p. 8), she would also have done well to say more about how the spread of print culture influenced both the individual performances of virtue and their representation. …
China Review International, 2002
China Review International, 1996
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2009
ABSTRACT
Comparative Literature, 1999
Preface Abbreviations Introduction: traditional Chinese fiction commentary in context Part I. A B... more Preface Abbreviations Introduction: traditional Chinese fiction commentary in context Part I. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction Commentary: 1. Mr. Pingdian: Jin Shengtan and the Shuihu zhuan 2. Dealing with Jin Shengtan and the rest of the 'Four Masterworks' 3. Decline and revival Part II. Making Room for Fiction: 4. Creating implied authors and readers 5. Liberating fiction from history 6. Liberating fiction from 'reality' Part III. From What to Who: The Turn Away from Plot: 7. From plot-centered to character-centered narratives 8. Relational characterization and ambiguos characters Part IV. How to Write the Chinese Novel: 9. Fiction criticism and how the story is told 10. Articulating the parts Part V. Four Solutions to the Challenge of Commentary: 11. Auto-commentary: the Xiyou bu and the Shuihu houzhuan 12. Commentator-narrators: Li Yu, Ding Yaokang, and Wen Kang 13. Latent commentary: the Rulin waishi 14. Everything all at once: the Honglou meng Works cited Glossary-Index.
The Journal of Asian Studies, Oct 29, 2007
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2009
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, Apr 1, 2023
This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from... more This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from male-authored xiaoshuo fiction as well as earlier literary tanci novels. This case study discusses Zaisheng yuan as a key text in an affective archive of narrative works written by women that provides insights into how elite women mentally negotiated the social and ideological expectations that informed their lives. In addition to looking at how women authors rewrote the conventions associated with scholar-beauty romances, the chastity cult, and the gendered symbols associated with proper order, this article discusses tanci novels as a unique outlet for women's explorations of autonomous will (zhi 志) and imaginings of emotional justice.
Harvard University Asia Center eBooks, Jan 15, 2019
Harvard University Asia Center eBooks, Jan 15, 2019