Current Announcements

Homola, Stéphanie. 2023. The Art of Fate Calculation. Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng. New York: Berghahn Books (Asian Anthropologies Series). ISBN 978-1-80073-812-6

This book dives into Chinese fate calculation, a practice which enthralls the Chinese despite official condemnations which have disparaged this traditional knowledge as “superstitions” since the beginning of the 20th century. From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds visit fate calculation masters to learn about and make the most of their destiny, be it to choose a career, get promoted, make an investment, or get married. How do clients experience fate calculation consultations? How do they choose a diviner and how do they assess his/her skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? What controversies structure the professional milieu? How is a person’s fate calculated? Through an investigation that takes us from Taiwan to China to meet the various actors of fate calculation, this work explores why so many people are interested in a form of knowledge which everyone admits to be highly complex and questionable.… Read more ⤻

The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China – A Case Study of the Xinmin Congbao and the Minbao, 1902-1910, Qing Cao, Routledge Studies in Chinese Discourse Analysis, January 2023: 148pp

The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China investigates the linguistic and intellectual roots of China’s modern transformation by presenting a systematic study of the interplay between language innovation and socio-political upheavals in the final decade of the Qing Empire.
This book will be useful and relevant to academics, postgraduate students and final year undergraduate students in the field of Chinese Studies, and anyone
interested in the role of language in shaping modern intellectual history.… Read more ⤻

We are happy to announce that vol. 3 (2022) of the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies is now online. As usual, it is fully open access (CC BY 4.0). This volume contains a special section on « Visual materials in local gazetteers » and three other research articles, four book reviews, and a list of PhDs defended in 2021 (at European institutions). You’ll be able to download each contribution there: https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/jeacs/issue/view/594

Finally, we would like to remind you of the ongoing call for vol. 4: https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/jeacs/announcement/view/99

Best wishes and a happy new year to all,

The editors of the JEACS

Table of Contents

https://doi.org/10.25365/jeacs.2022.3.toc
 
Alexis Lycas, Marie Bizais-Lillig, Laura De Giorgi, Alison Hardie, Sascha Klotzbücher, Frank Kraushaar
Editorial: New Views on Visual Materials 視覺影像刮目相看
https://doi.org/10.25365/jeacs.2022.3.lycas_et_al
 
Kenneth Hammond 
Visual Materials in Chinese Local Gazetteers 中國視覺方志
https://doi.org/10.25365/jeacs.2022.3.hammond
 
Xin Yu 余 欣
Scenic Views of Administrative Units in Ming China 明代方志中的府州縣景致研究
https://doi.org/10.25365/jeacs.2022.3.yu
 
Sander Molenaar 
Locating the Sea: A Visual and Social Analysis of Coastal Gazetteers in Late Imperial China 給海洋定位: 明清時期沿海方志的視覺及社會分析
https://doi.org/10.25365/jeacs.2022.3.molenaar

Alison Hardie, The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 320pp., HK$750, ISBN 978-988-8754-07-6.
The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and re-assesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, but is best known as a dramatist, and his poetry is now largely unknown. He is most notorious as a ‘treacherous official’ of the Ming–Qing transition, and as a result his literary work—his plays as well as his poetry—has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan’s literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognised since his own time.… Read more ⤻

Fern von Geschichte und verheißungsvollen Tagen. Neoklassizistische Cyberlyrik im ChinaNetz und die Schreibweise des Lizilizilizi (2000-2020)

(Distant From History and Auspicious Days. Neoclassicist Cyberpoetry in the ChinaNet and the Poetic Diction of Lizilizilizi (2000-2020))

As a first attempt to explore in greater detail the contemporary phenomena of “modern verse in old style” 舊體新詩 published and read online, this book-essay contributes to a shift of perception in the studies of modern Chinese literature postulated by individual scholars and manifested collectively “not only to set right the misconception of the deterministic view regarding the development of the Chinese literary tradition, but also to affirm its vitality, continuity, and power of rebirth. (“Frankfurt Consensus”,2015)

In the first two parts of the book, the phenomena is approached from various angles: 1. biased perception and representation (via translation) of modern and classical Chinese poetry in the West, 2. transition from “old style poetry” to “new old style poetry” in China, distinction between “classicist” and “neoclassicist” diction, 3.… Read more ⤻