Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China, 1127-1279

✍ Scribed by Christian De Pee; Martin Powers; Joseph S.C. Lam; Shuen-Fu Lin

• Publisher: Chinese University Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 381
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The city of Hangzhou symbolized all of the contradictions of the declining Song Empire (960-1279). It was paramount and feeble, awe-inspiring and threatened, the most admired city and a disgrace to its dynastic founders. Rather than debate the merit of these polemical judgments, the contributors to this volume treat them as expressions of their historical moment, reflecting ideological convictions and aesthetic preferences.

Leading scholars of the field, including Beverly Bossler, Stephen West, and Martin Powers, have produced essays that relate changes in literary convention to shifts in territorial boundaries, and analyze writing, painting, dance, and music as means by which individual literati placed themselves in time and space. The contributors re-establish the historical connections between writing and meaningful action, between text and world, between the sources and their own words, and between the page and the senses. Their efforts to retrieve the sounds, sights, and smells of Hangzhou from Southern Song texts replicate, in reverse direction, the attempts of twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors to devise effective tropes and suitable genres that would preserve their living impressions of the city in writing.

✦ Table of Contents

Half Title Page
Full Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Introduction
1. Floating Sleeves, Willow Waists, and Dreams of Spring
2. Eavesdropping on Zhang Xiaoxiang’s Musical World in Early Southern Song China
3. Picturing Time in Song Painting and Poetry
4. Consciousness of Adversity and the Spirit of Innovation
5. The Pains of Pleasure
6. Crime, Violence, and Ghosts in the Lin'an Stories in Yijian zhi
7. Nature's Capital
8. How Does an Ojective Correlative Objectify?
9. A City of Substance
Notes
Indes