In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard analyzes images of women in painting and poetry of China’s middle imperial period, focusing on works that represent female figures as preoccupied with romance. She discusses examples of visual and literary culture in regard to their authorship and audience, examining the role of interiority in constructions of gender...(展开全部)

Words and Images contains twenty-three essays based on papers presented at an international symposium held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 1985 to celebrate the gifts and promised gifts of Chinese calligraphy and painting from John M. Crawford, Jr. In these essays senior scholars from Asia and America express a wide range of perspectives on an issue that is central to ...(展开全部)

Throughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticize government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Mur...(展开全部)

Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, this book demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illusion in the development of Western painting from Hellenistic Greece to the present. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected, and refracted is evident ...(展开全部)

Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that there is a massive amount of historical evidence on the subject. China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-ce...(展开全部)

Review "Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China is very impressive, extremely rich in new information about art and women in the Song. The analysis is sophisticated, theoretically informed, and smart; the prose is smooth, even elegant." Beverly Bossler, University of California, Davis "This is an important book that breaks new ground in several scholarly areas and does...(展开全部)

What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them d...(展开全部)

Enka, a sentimental ballad genre, epitomizes for many the nihonjin no kokoro (heart/soul of Japanese). To older members of the Japanese public, who constitute enka's primary audience, this music - of parted lovers, long unseen rural hometowns and self-sacrificing mothers - evokes a direct connection to the traditional roots of "Japaneseness". Overlooked in this emotional invoca...(展开全部)

"Using selected key figures from Chinese literature from the Tang through the Qing, Isaac Yue traces the increasing attribution of monstrous qualities to foreigners as a means to demean the Other while inflating the stature of Chinese cultural identity. Yue’s sharp observations on the evolving images of Zhang Fei, Sun Wukong, and Zhong Kui will surely inspire a reevaluation of ...(展开全部)