Details

Description

1 online resource

text txt rdacontent

computer c rdamedia

online resource cr rdacarrier

Series

JSTOR EBA.

Note

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed September 8, 2017).

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

There are maggots in my soup! : medieval accounts of unfilial children / Keith N. Knapp -- Negative role models : unfilial stories in Song miscellaneous writing / Cong Ellen Zhang -- Copulating with one's stepmother or birth mother? / Paul R. Goldin -- Intransigent and corrupt officials during the early Han / Anthony Barbieri-Low -- Ritual without rules : Han-Dynasty mourning practice revisited / Miranda Brown and Anna-Alexandra Fodde-Regue -- Bad writing : cursive calligraphy and the ethics of orthography in the eastern Han Dynasty / Vincent S. Leung -- Wild youths and fallen officials : falconry and moral opprobrium in early medieval China / Leslie V. Wallace -- Stopping drinking : alcohol, alcoholism, and Song literati / Edward van-Bibber Orr -- Flouting, flashing and favoritism : an insouciant Buddhist monk bares his midriff before the Confucian court / N. Harry Rothschild -- Running amok in early Chinese narrative / Eric Henry -- "Wolves shepherding the people" : cruelty and violence in the Five dynasties / Wang Hongjie -- A "villain-monk" brought down by a villein-general : a forgotten page in Tang monastic warfare and state-samgha relations / Chen Jinhua -- Martial monks without borders : was Sinseong a traitor or did he open the gate to a pan-Asian Buddhist realm? / Kelly Carlton.

Summary

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues' gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25-220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618-907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960-1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to "valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial" and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907-979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests--a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power

Local Note

JSTOR

Subject

Deviant behavior -- China -- History -- To 1500.

China -- Social life and customs -- 221 B.C.-960 A.D.

China -- Social life and customs -- 960-1644.

Social norms -- China -- History -- To 1500.

Filial piety -- China -- History -- To 1500.

War -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism -- History -- To 1500.

War -- Religious aspects -- Confucianism -- History -- To 1500.

Chine -- Mœurs et coutumes -- 221 av. J.-C.-960.

Chine -- Mœurs et coutumes -- 960-1644.

PSYCHOLOGY -- Social Psychology.

HISTORY -- Asia -- China.

War -- Religious aspects -- Confucianism. (OCoLC)fst02019609

Deviant behavior. (OCoLC)fst00891953

Filial piety. (OCoLC)fst00924159

Manners and customs. (OCoLC)fst01007815

Social norms. (OCoLC)fst01122692

War -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism. (OCoLC)fst01170377

China. (OCoLC)fst01206073

Chronological Term

To 1644

Genre/Form

Electronic books.

History. (OCoLC)fst01411628

Added Author

Wallace, Leslie V.

Rothschild, N. Harry, editor.

Wallace, Leslie V., editor.

Other Form:

Print version: Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China. Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, [2017] (DLC) 2016053510

ISBN

9780824874223 (electronic bk.)

0824874226 (electronic bk.)

9780824867812