AGENCY IN THE MARGINS: READERS AND COLLECTORS IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

Wang, Fan

Publication:
AGENCY IN THE MARGINS: READERS AND COLLECTORS IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

dc.contributor.advisor	Kathryn Lachman
dc.contributor.advisor	Elena Suet-Ying Chiu
dc.contributor.advisor	Joseph Black
dc.contributor.advisor	Stephen Platt
dc.contributor.author	Wang, Fan
dc.contributor.department	University of Massachusetts Amherst
dc.date	2024-03-28T16:20:04.000
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-26T15:37:50Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-26T15:37:50Z
dc.date.issued	2020-05-08
dc.date.submitted	May
dc.date.submitted	2020
dc.description.abstract	My dissertation traces the lives of books beyond the domains of authors, publishers, and printers in late imperial China. In other words, my project maps the other half of a book’s life cycle, the half during which it travelled among dealers, collectors, and user-readers, acquiring textual and material traces of each encounter, assuming different meanings, values, status, and functions as it was put to different uses in different social and cultural contexts. I argue that books, instead of being fixed, self-contained entities, are living and changing creations constantly transformed in both form and meaning as they move through a relational field constituted of the people they encounter, the events they are enrolled in, and the places and times they traverse. To borrow Tim Ingold’s concept of “continuous birth”, books are always in the process of becoming. Drawing upon Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and meshwork theory, my project charts the entangled itineraries, the dynamic movements between people and books in late imperial China. I explore how books bring people together, connecting dealers with collectors, creating bonds between readers across generations, geographical areas, and social classes; and how people in turn bring books together, either through curated collections, meticulously compiled library catalogues, or collectanea that set texts in dialogue with one another. Books do not exist on their own, but are defined and constituted by the company they keep and the relationships they form, whether with humans or other books. And it is the intermeshed routes along which they migrate that make them the enlivened things they are.
dc.description.degree	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.description.department	Comparative Literature
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.7275/16585417
dc.identifier.orcid	https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1239-8338
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/18151
dc.relation.url	https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2939&context=dissertations_2&unstamped=1
dc.source.status	published
dc.subject	book history
dc.subject	Jiangnan
dc.subject	private library
dc.subject	studio
dc.subject	peddler
dc.subject	literati
dc.subject	Asian History
dc.subject	Chinese Studies
dc.subject	Comparative Literature
dc.subject	Cultural History
dc.title	AGENCY IN THE MARGINS: READERS AND COLLECTORS IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA
dc.type	campusfive
dc.type	article
dc.type	dissertation
digcom.contributor.author	isAuthorOfPublication\|email:fanw@umass.edu\|institution:University of Massachusetts Amherst\|Wang, Fan
digcom.identifier	dissertations_2/1884
digcom.identifier.contextkey	16585417
digcom.identifier.submissionpath	dissertations_2/1884
dspace.entity.type	Publication