Ming Qing Studies 2016

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

The image of the heroine of the Honglou meng, from the early illustrations to the later media representations, is presented in the inter-textual and cross-media study “Picturing Lin Daiyu: Honglou meng Across Media” by I-Hsien Wu. On the same novel an analysis crossing both literary inquiry and history of ideas is “The Concept of Qing in Honglou meng, (Part 1) – Historical Inheritance” by Chunlam Yiu. On the Liaozhai zhiyi, the contrast between the tales of enchantment and romance of humans with ghosts or fox spirits, on one hand, and the horror tales, with ugly, frightening, malignant ghosts and monsters, on the other, is the topic of Sarah Dodd’s “Explorations of Desire: Monsters, Horror and Enchantment in Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi”. Loredana Cesarino, in “Tian Yiheng’s Shi nüshi and its influence on the authorship of the Tang poem ‘Presented to Pei Siqian’”, traces the origins of the mistaken attribution to the Shi nüshi (1557) and discusses the textual changes that affected the story of the Tang courtesan of Pingkang district and the authorship of the poem “Presented to Pei Siqian”. An essay between literary criticism and history is the contribution by Tsui Winnie Wai, “Literary Reactions to the Taiping Rebellion (1853-1864): A Study of the Poetry of Jiang Chunlin (1818-1868)” on the poet’s reflections on the rebellion, and the function and styles of expression of shi and ci poetry. Zheng Zemian is author of one of the few studies on Luo Jinxi outside of Chinese and Japanese speaking worlds, “Thinking through the Heart of a Child: Luo Jinxi on Body and Ritual”. Dandan Chen’s “The Literary Expression of the Self during the Ming-Qing Transition” is an interesting contribution to the understanding of the self-identity question of literati in the dramatic transition period between the two last dynasties. “What was tolerated? The Reinterpretation of the Edict of Toleration of 1692” by Yufang Chen focuses on the Jesuits’ own understanding of the Edict of Toleration in 1692 and its inlfuence on local missions. A case of cultural and political encounter between China and Russia is presented by Gaia Perini in “‘Angels of Vengeance’: the Influence of Russian anarchist and nihilist movements on the Chinese revolutionary discourse during the last decade of the Qing dynasty” . And on the socio-cultural interaction between Russia and China in the 17th-early 20th Centuries Anna Di Toro extensively discusses on a recent Russian volume entirely devoted to the manifold forms of the mutual influences between the two empires and their reciprocal images.

SINTESI