The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West

The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West
ISBN-10
0190606568
ISBN-13
9780190606565
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
280
Language
English
Published
2016-12-22
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Ning Ma

Description

"This book advances a "horizontal" method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the 'Age of Silver,' this study emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial co-evolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realisms in places such as China, Japan, Spain, and England. The main texts it addresses include The Plum in the Golden Vase (anonymous, China, late sixteenth century), Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, Spain, 1605 and 1615), The Life of an Amorous Man (Ihara Saikaku, Japan, 1682), and Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, England, 1719). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansions' stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with politically critical functions and connote "heteroglossic" national imaginaries. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. On a broader level, it challenges the unilateral equation between globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of 'world literature' and historical transcultural relations"

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