Books on China's Culture
by
Professor Daria Berg,
DPhil Oxford
Cutting-Edge Insights into Chinese Literature, Art and Culture
Explore the world of ordinary men and women, courtesans, poets, painters, novelists, artists, doctors, merchants, students and scholars in China past and present.
Find out how China imagines utopia. What are her dreams and nightmares? Her aims and aspirations?
Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580-1700
2013
The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class
2007
Carnival in China: A Reading of the "Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan"
2002
Reading China: Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse
2007
Perceptions of Lay Healers in Late Imperial China
2000
Portraying China's New Women Entrepreneurs: A Reading of Zhang Xin's Fiction
2000
Transforming Book Culture in China, 1600-2016
2016
More about
Daria Berg's Books
China's Avantgarde, 1978-2018
edited by
DARIA BERG & GIORGIO STRAFELLA
This book examines how China’s new generation of avant-garde writers and artists are pushing the boundaries of vernacular culture, creatively appropriating artistic and literary languages from global cultures to reflect on reform-era China’s transformation and the Maoist heritage. It explores the vortex of cultural change from the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 to Xi Jinping establishing his leadership for life in 2018. The book argues that China’s new avant-garde adopt transcultural forms of expression while challenging the official discourse of Xi Jinping’s regime, which promotes cultural nationalism and demands that cultural production in China embodies the essence of the “Chinese nation”. The topics range from body art, women’s poetry and boys’ love literature to Tibetan fiction and ceramic art. The book shows how the avant-garde use the new digital media to bypass government censorship, transcending China’s virtual frontiers while breaking new ground for an emerging public sphere. Overall, the book provides a rich picture of the nature of China’s avant-garde art and literature and the challenges it poses for the Chinese government.
Transforming Book Culture in China, 1600-2016
edited by
DARIA BERG & GIORGIO STRAFELLA
2016
The book presents the latest findings on Chinese book culture. Top international scholars investigate the past, present and future of the book in China. The book provides a panorama of the latest trends. It creates a roadmap to enhance our understanding of China’s book culture past and present.
The first part of the book traces the historical development of the book market in China. The second part focuses on literature in China’s society today. It investigates government censorship and the digital public sphere in the age of Web 2.0.
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Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580-1700
by
DARIA BERG
2013
What did it feel like to be a woman in early modern China? How did she love, live and think? What were her dreams, desires and nightmares? This book explores the world of women from 1580 to 1700. Come along on a journey into the world of courtesans, elite ladies, women poets, painters and writers. This book reconstructs examples of particular women’s personal experiences. It shows how women talked about men, and how men talked about women.
This book examines the place of women in traditional Chinese society. It shows how the roles of women changed in early modern China. Providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting and engaging literary works, this book opens fascinating new windows onto the lives of women in China at the brink of modernity.
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The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class
edited by
DARIA BERG & CHLOE STARR
2007
Gentility denotes the way of the gentleman and gentlewoman. This book offers new perspectives on Chinese culture by leading scholars of China.
How has the way of the gentleman and gentlewoman shaped Chinese culture past and present? The quest for gentility has shaped Chinese culture to the present day. This book provides important new insights into the ways Chinese men and women lived their lives.
This book explores what men and women loved, desired and feared. It reveals their dreams, ideals and aspirations in China from 1550 until today. It uncovers what they thought about femininity, gentlemanly elegance, status and power.
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Reading China: Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse
edited by
DARIA BERG
2007
This groundbreaking volume opens a new window on both modern and traditional Chinese literature, history and popular culture, demonstrating how a new style of reading brings us—the modern reader—closer to understanding how Chinese citizens perceived their world and what their writings reveal about the culture that produced them. Following the pioneering work of Professor Glen Dudbridge, this book brings together eight studies that develop a new style of reading Chinese sources by exploring the dynamics of discourse across open boundaries: those of fiction and history, literary and non-literary sources, official and vernacular culture, prose and poetry, records past and present, lost and extant, vernacular and classical, traditional and modern. Each chapter discusses how authors, editors and publishers use representation, editing and selection as means of self-fashioning and political propaganda.
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Carnival in China: A Reading of the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan
by
DARIA BERG
2002
Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan (Marriage Destinies to Bring Society to its Senses) is an anonymous novel from seventeenth-century China. A dystopian satire, the novel provides fascinating insights into the lives of ordinary men and women in traditional China. Carnival in China explores how seventeenth-century Chinese citizens perceived their world. Through their eyes, we gain access to their desires, dreams, fears and nightmares.
We meet doctors who kill their patients, teachers who eat their students, greedy physicians, street-wise bell doctors, medical experts, lustful monks, nuns, students who cheat in exams and buy their degrees, wise scholars, corrupt officials, upright merchants and all kinds of women – sexy prostitutes, shrewish wives, pretty daughters and goddesses. As if under the satirical magnifying glass, it portrays local society and provincial life in seventeenth-century China in comic and grotesque close-up.
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