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Books
Available
Publication year: 2007
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| Series: | China Studies, 14 |
| ISBN-13 (i)The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) has been changed from 10 to 13 digits on 1 January 2007: | 978 90 04 15629 6 |
| ISBN-10: | 90 04 15629 1 |
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| Cover: | Hardback |
| Number of pages: | xxvi, 294 pp. |
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| List price: | € 104.00 / US$ 154.00 |
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Readership
To scholars and students of Chinese literature, especially those interested in the late Qing period; to scholars of comparative literature; textual studies and gender studies.
About the author(s)
Chloë Starr, DPhil (2000) in Oriental Studies, Oxford, is a Departmental Lecturer in Classical Chinese at the University of Oxford. She has published on textual and gender issues in late Qing fiction.
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Chinese literature has traditionally been divided by both theorists and university course providers into ‘classical’ and ‘modern.’ This has left nineteenth-century fiction in limbo, and allowed negative assessments of its quality to persist unchecked. The popularity of Qing dynasty red-light fiction – works whose primary focus is the relationship between clients and courtesans, set in tea-houses, pleasure gardens, and later, brothels – has endured throughout the twentieth century. This volume explores why, arguing that these novels are far from the ‘low’ work of ‘frustrated scholars’ but in their provocative play on the nature of relations between client, courtesan and text, provide an insight into wider changes in understandings of self and literary value in the nineteenth century.
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