Senses of the city : perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China, 1127-1279 / edited by Jospeh S.C. Lam, Shuen-fu Lin, Christian de Pee, and Martin Powers.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-341) and index.

Print version record.

Introduction -- 1. Floating sleeves, willow waists, and dreams of spring: entertainment and its enemies in Song history and historiography / Beverly Bossler -- 2. Eavesdropping on Zhang Xiaoxiang's musical world in early Southern Song China / Joseph S.C. Lam -- 3. Picturing time in Song painting and poetry / Martin Powers -- 4. Consciousness of adversity and the spirit of innovation: Jiang Kui's "Poems on past travels" and the urban culture of Hangzhou in the Southern Song / Zhang Hongsheng (translated by Gang Liu) -- 5. The pains of pleasure: the lanterns of Kaifeng / Stephen H. West -- 6. Crime, violence, and ghosts in the Lin'an stories in Yijian zhi / Ronald Egan -- 7. Nature's capital: the city as garden in The splendid scenery of the capital (Ducheng jisheng, 1235) / Christian de Pee -- 8. How does an objective correlative objectify? West Lake as the site for patriotic sentiment in Southern Song lyrics / Xinda Lian -- 9. A city of substance: regional custom and the political landscape of Shaoxing in a Southern Song rhapsody / Benjamin Ridgway.

The city of Hangzhou symbolized all of the contradictions of the declining Song Empire (960-1279). It was paramount and feeble, awe-inspiring and threatened, the most admired city and a disgrace to its dynastic founders. Rather than debate the merit of these polemical judgments, the contributors to this volume treat them as expressions of their historical moment, reflecting ideological convictions and aesthetic preferences. Leading scholars of the field, including Beverly Bossler, Stephen West, and Martin Powers, have produced essays that relate changes in literary convention to shifts in territorial boundaries, and analyze writing, painting, dance, and music as means by which individual literati placed themselves in time and space. The contributors re-establish the historical connections between writing and meaningful action, between text and world, between the sources and their own words, and between the page and the senses. Their efforts to retrieve the sounds, sights, and smells of Hangzhou from Southern Song texts replicate, in reverse direction, the attempts of twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors to devise effective tropes and suitable genres that would preserve their living impressions of the city in writing.

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