Peony Lantern Tales : Ghostly Encounters in the Early Modern Sinosphere.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Joo, Fumiko.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Qu, You, 1341-1427. Jian deng xin hua.

Qu, You.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 2025.

Summary:

""The Story of the Peony Lantern" by the Chinese author Qu You (1347-1433) travelled across lingual, cultural, and geopolitical borders in early modern East Asia. The original tale, set in fourteenth-century Ningbo, China, is one of ghostly seduction and murder, but it continued to transform as it traveled from city to city and in its encounters with characters from other texts, publishing networks, and countless readers in the Sinosphere. Fumiko Jōo closely analyzes the cultural and societal structures that framed how a seductive female ghost was reconceived in texts, sites, and objects, both locally and trans-regionally. The myriad transformations of "The Peony Lantern" explain the context and the structures of knowledge production and practice where depictions of female sexuality, death, and morality emerged and were remade. Jōo incorporates a breadth of sources, from local gazetteers to theater ephemera, to shed light on the cultural life of objects, the collective memory of vanished sites, and the public's desire to encounter the phantom. She examines the historical moments and sociocultural spaces where Peony Lantern narratives and their writers thrived, following the tale as it moved from Hangzhou literati from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries to an early nineteenth-century group of Edo playwrights, kabuki theater producers, and publishers. Readers will welcome Jōo's exploration of the tale's transformation by local scholars of Ningbo in the eighteenth century and the female classical writer Arakida Reijo (1732-1806) and her Ise literary circle. The key sites of literary activity for the stories, according to Jōo's illuminating analyses, are not modern nation-states but networks of literati connected by class, gender, and regional affinities. This volume includes complete translations of Qu You's original "Peony Lantern" and two later adaptions, "The Double-Fish Fan Pendant" by Xiong Long Feng Publishing House and Arakida's "Floating Weeds.""-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Names

Map

Introduction

Part I - Lantern and Stage

1. The Past in the Present: Qu You's Odes on Lanterns and Dynastic Change

2. Peony Lanterns on Stage: Visions of Decay and the Interplay of Text, Image, and Performance

Part II - Religious Space and Gender

3. Where Ghosts Are Kept Forever: The Vanished Temple and a Nameless Pagoda in Ningbo

4. Neither Punishment nor Salvation: Arakida Reijo's Forever Floating Ghosts

Epilogue

Appendix A: The Story of the Peony Lantern, by Qu You

Appendix B: The Tale of Kong Shufang's Double-Fish Fan Pendant

Appendix C: Floating Weeds, by Arakida Reijo

Glossary

Notes

Works Cited

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Contains:

Container of: Qu, You, 1341-1427. Jian deng xin hua. English.

Container of: Arakida, Reijo, 1732-1806. Ukigusa. English.

Container of: Kong Shufang shuang yu shan zhui zhuan. English.

ISBN:

979-88-8070-043-1

OCLC:

1463562086