Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict.
Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions—people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found—to tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss.
The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu’s writings, and Wu Weiye’s poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history.
2 有用 Ichi 2025-07-04 15:14:58 湖北
things大多局限于文人把玩的aesthetic things,范围较窄;关注的material culture也只是物在文人活动中的symbolic meaning and social function, 与此同理分析小说中的物时局限于物品在narrative中的function而缺乏对material details本身的细读(描写中的物质感性、感官性等等),但文学的物质书写之所以值得关注... things大多局限于文人把玩的aesthetic things,范围较窄;关注的material culture也只是物在文人活动中的symbolic meaning and social function, 与此同理分析小说中的物时局限于物品在narrative中的function而缺乏对material details本身的细读(描写中的物质感性、感官性等等),但文学的物质书写之所以值得关注不就是因为它能用极其细致的语言尝试跨媒介地再现materiality本身吗 (展开)
2 有用 非必要也赚梁皇 2022-09-14 15:49:52 北京
会引进
0 有用 Yinanaa 2023-09-29 23:49:04 美国
Intro. The relation between human and thing in the context of the history of thought, aestehtics and subjectivity; thing as pleasure, knowledge and power, rather than consumption.
2 有用 学术职人预备役 2023-01-14 05:05:34 美国
“Material history”这玩意做到现在也真是了无新意了。理论和概念上完全没有力度,史实层面也是讨巧多于坚实。这本书非常典型。