Details

Description

1 online resource (viii, 283 pages).

data file rda

Series

A Robert B. Heilman Book

Robert Heilman book.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-280) and index.

Summary

"Printed novels, guides to daily life, and practical medical texts were relatively new in sixteenth-century China, but they quickly became popular and influential. Novel Medicine shows how fiction shaped and was shaped by medical discourse and how it popularized practical, vernacular kinds of knowledge. A vibrant exchange among literary, commercial, and medical spheres resulted in a web of texts that produced distinct genealogies of romantic and sexual disease, iconographic lineages of heroic doctors, and medicalized attitudes toward reading. Novel Medicine interrogates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge. Conversely, it demonstrates how practical medical texts employed literary devices and figurative strategies to propagate information. Employing interdisciplinary strategies, it examines the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine as well as their representations of illnesses and healers. Critical readings of fictional and medical texts, as well as sources such as fiction commentary, criticism, medical manuscripts, newspapers, essays, print images, and biographies inform an understanding of the body in early modern China. These readings also provide a counterpoint to prevailing narratives that focus on the 'literati' aspects of the novel, showing that these texts were not merely read, but were used by a wide variety of readers and for a range of purposes. This inquiry into the intersections of kinds and sources of knowledge--fictional and real, elite and vernacular--illuminates the history of reading and daily life and challenges us to rethink the nature of Chinese literature"--Provided by publisher.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Beginning to read : some methods and background -- Reading medically : novel illnesses, novel cures -- Vernacular curiosities : medical entertainments and memory -- Diseases of sex : medical and literary views of contagion and retribution -- Diseases of Qing : medical and literary views of depletion -- Contagious texts : inherited maladies and the invention of tuberculosis -- Chinese character glossary.

Note

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

Language

English.

Subject

Chinese fiction -- Ming dynasty, 1368-1644 -- History and criticism.

Chinese fiction -- Qing dynasty, 1644-1912 -- History and criticism.

Healing in literature.

Medicine in literature.

Diseases in literature.

Medical literature -- China -- History.

Literature and society -- China -- History.

Books and reading -- Social aspects -- China -- History.

Popular culture -- China -- History.

Knowledge, Sociology of -- History.

Medicine in Literature.

Reading -- history.

Medical Writing -- history.

China.

LITERARY CRITICISM -- Asian -- General.

HISTORY -- Asia -- China.

Books and reading -- Social aspects.

Chinese fiction.

Chinese fiction -- Ming dynasty.

Diseases in literature.

Healing in literature.

Knowledge, Sociology of.

Literature and society.

Medical literature.

Medicine in literature.

Popular culture.

Qing Dynasty (China)

China.

Chronological Term

1368-1912

Genre/Form

Electronic books.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Other Form:

Print version: Novel medicine Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2016] 9780295995182 (hardcover : alk. paper) (DLC) 2015038296

ISBN

9780295806327 electronic book

Standard No.

40025856737