The Inscription of Things
Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Published:21st Nov '23
£117.00
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Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.
Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.
With its rigorous scholarship and insightful arguments, this book takes the analysis of how things, words, and people were entangled in the Ming-Qing period to a new level of sophistication. It is a rich and substantial advance in understanding the place of a distinctive materiality in China's literary and artistic culture. -- Craig Clunas, author of Chinese Painting and Its Audiences
Equally at home with words and things, the author of this affecting book reveals such trivia as inscriptions for inkcakes, inkslabs, and seals to be the stuff of literature of the highest order and, in so doing, affirms precarity as a condition of possibility and creativity. -- Dorothy Ko, author of The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China
This important study advances our understanding of how readers, writers, and collectors in the Ming and Qing navigated the complex connections between the written object and the physical word while remaining sensitive to the complex lives and social relations in which their textual-material creations intervened. It will be essential reading for scholars of the literature, material culture, and intellectual history of the period. -- Bruce Rusk, author of Critics and Commentators: The Book of Poems as Classic and Literature
Full of illuminating insights, this nuanced study of inscriptions on a wide range of objects will be an important resource for students of writing, material culture, and media studies. -- Wei Shang, author of Writing on Landmarks: From Yellow Crane Tower to Phoenix Pavilion
This elegant study takes up a host of difficult materials to consider afresh the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture. Beautifully researched, The Inscription of Things will be read by historians, art historians, and scholars of literature who will particularly enjoy the fascinating sections on materials and technology, as well as the inspiring elucidation of densely allusive texts. -- Sophie Volpp, author of The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550–1775
This original, imaginative, and inspiring book contributes not only to a richer understanding of the media ecology in early modern China but also to an understanding of the enlarged boundaries of literature with its traversing of different material forms, discourses, and social functions. It is an epitome of excellent literary analysis—a great pleasure to read. -- Suyoung Son, author of Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China
It will richly reward those who pay close attention.....Grasping the epic through the mundane, this book teaches how inscribed things constituted speech and realms of literature for those who sought to talk through them. * Journal of Chinese History *
ISBN: 9780231209625
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
368 pages