Research Catalog

Novel medicine : healing, literature, and popular knowledge in early modern China

Title: Novel medicine : healing, literature, and popular knowledge in early modern China / Andrew Schonebaum.
Author: Schonebaum, Andrew, 1975-
Publication: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2016].

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	JFE 16-4715	Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description

viii, 283 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

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.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-280) 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.

Call Number

JFE 16-4715

ISBN

9780295995182
0295995181

LCCN

2015038296

OCLC

923665840

Author

Schonebaum, Andrew, 1975-

Title

Novel medicine : healing, literature, and popular knowledge in early modern China / Andrew Schonebaum.

Publisher

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2016].

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

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

Research Call Number

JFE 16-4715

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