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

By:

Schonebaum, Andrew, 1975-

Material type: Text

TextPublisher: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2016Description: 1 online resourceContent type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780295806327
029580632X

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Additional physical formats: Print version:: Novel medicineDDC classification:

895.13/409 23

LOC classification:

PL2436 .S35 2016eb

NLM classification:

2016 G-034
WZ 330

Online resources:

Click here to access online

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.

Scope and content: "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.

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"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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

English.

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