This volume brings together fourteen essays that explore the role of hiddenness—as both an object and a mode of representation—in the history of cultural production in China from the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE) to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911) and beyond. The rhetorical use of various forms of hiddenness makes its appearance in literary, political, philosophical, and religious writings, as well as in the visual arts. Working in fields as disparate as traditional Chinese literature, religion, philosophy, history, medicine, and art, the contributors attempt to characterize one of the fundamental signifying practices in traditional Chinese cultural production. In the process, they not only reveal otherwise obscure patterns connecting longstanding social, political, aesthetic, and epistemological practices, but also contribute to ongoing discussions—well beyond the field of China studies—regarding the representation and communicability of knowledge, as well as the practices controlling its dissemination.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Lowered Curtains in the Half-Light: An Introduction
Paula M. Varsano
I. The Art of Withholding
2. The Ruling Mind: Persuasion and the Origins of Chinese Psychology
David Schaberg
3. Beliefs about Social Seeing: Hiddenness (wei 微) and Visibility in Classical-Era China
Michael Nylan
4. Woman in the Tower:“Nineteen Old Poems”and the Poetics of Un/concealment
Xiaofei Tian
5. Hiding Behind a Woman: Contexts and Meanings in Early Qing Poetry
Wai-yee Li
II. The Lessons of Distraction
6. Hiddenness of the Body and the Metaphysics of Sight
Shigehisa Kuriyama
7. Worlds of Meaning and the Meaning of Worlds in Sikong Tu’s
Twenty-Four Modes of Poetry
Paula M. Varsano
III. On Blind Spots
8. Hidden in Plain View: Concealed Contents, Secluded Statues, and Revealed Religion
James Robson
9. The Vernacular Story and the Hiddenness of Value
Sophie Volpp
10. Absence and Presence: The Great Wall in Chinese Art
Lillian Lan-ying Tseng
IV. The Languages of Synecdoche
11. Synecdoche of the Imaginary
Stephen Owen
12.“The Disarrayed Hills Conceal an Old Monastery”: The Dynamics of Poetry and Painting in the Northern Song
Eugene Wang
V. Just Words
13. Manifesting Sagely Knowledge: Commentarial Strategies in Chinese Late Antiquity
Michael Puett
14. The
Yi-Xiang-Yan Paradigm and Early Chinese Theories of Literary Creation
Zong-qi Cai
Contributors
Index
About the author
Paula M. Varsano is Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of
Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and Its Critical Reception.
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