Tears from iron : cultural responses to famine in nineteenth-century China / Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley ; with a foreword by Cormac Ó Gráda.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Edgerton-Tarpley, Kathryn, 1970-

Series:

Asia--local studies/global themes ; 15.

Asia--local studies/global themes ; 15

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Famines--China--History--19th century.

Famines.

History.

China--Social conditions--1644-1912.

China.

Social conditions.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 332 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2008.

Summary:

This multi-layered history of a horrific famine that took place in late-nineteenth-century China focuses on cultural responses to trauma. The massive drought/famine that killed at least ten million people in North China during the late 1870s remains one of China's most severe disasters and provides a vivid window through which to study the social side of a nation's tragedy. Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley's original approach explores an array of new source materials, including songs, poems, stele inscriptions, folklore, and oral accounts of the famine from Shanxi Province, its epicenter. She juxtaposes these narratives with central government, treaty-port, and foreign debates over the meaning of the events and shows how the famine, which occurred during a period of deepening national crisis, elicited widely divergent reactions from different levels of Chinese society.

Contents:

Shanxi, greater China, and the famine

Experiencing the famine : the hierarchy of suffering in a famine song from Xiezhou

The wrath of heaven versus human greed

Qing officialdom and the politics of famine

Views from the outside : science, railroads, and laissez-faire economics

Hybrid voices : the famine and Jiangnan activism

Family and gender in famine

The "feminization of famine" and the feminization of nationalism

Eating culture : cannibalism and the semiotics of starvation, 1870-2001

Epilogue. New tears for new times : the famine revisited.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-317) and index.

ISBN:

9780520253025

0520253027

OCLC:

174112640