Description
Book SynopsisChina’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented explosion in the production of woodblock-printed books. This volume considers what a wide range of late Ming books reveal about their readers’ ideas of a pleasurable private life, as well as their orientations toward early modernity and toward traditional Chinese sources of authority.
Trade ReviewHome and the World brilliantly fills a large gap in the existing literature on Ming book culture. It builds on the insights of earlier works and proposes a finer analysis of what texts, in both their materiality and their contents, can reveal about reading tastes and practices in the late Ming. In its focus on a range of different texts and its close analysis of these texts and their illustrations (and their imagined readership), this exciting and beautifully researched work signals the growing sophistication of the study of Chinese book culture. -- Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University
Home and the World makes a tremendous contribution to current scholarly understandings of the rise of print culture and its rapid spread during the Ming period… It complements and brings to completion previous work in literature, art history (particularly book illustrations), the history of the book, theater history, and studies of popular culture by asking new and startlingly objective questions… By choosing a number of ostensibly dissimilar texts and by relentlessly combing contemporary texts for references to them, He reveals new sources of information, new avenues of interpretation, and truly new insights. -- Robert E. Hegel, Washington University in St. Louis
