Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in
a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a
series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first
multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity
was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted
and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing
on Zhou's work, "Art by the Book" describes how such publications
accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public,
and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which
everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary
cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of
a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern
China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of
literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers
with a device for enhancing social capital.
J. P. Park builds on important recent research on social status,
economic development, and print publishing in late imperial China
to show how a world of social meaning is evident in the literary
subgenre of painting manuals, and provides insight into the links
between art history, print culture, and social history.
""Art by the Book" is a significant contribution to our
understanding of the way taste, status, and a growing urban sphere
changed the content of elite self-understanding in 16th- and
17th-century China. By constantly cross-cutting between social
history and the content and style of the painting manuals, Park
demonstrates how even those outside the literati orbit could begin
to take on the aura of the highest elites." -Katherine Carlitz,
University of Pittsburgh
"The printed manuals are situated within the wider horizons of
late Ming thought, literature, tastes, fashions, values, and
lifestyles. Thus, in addition to students of late imperial Chinese
art history, this book should appeal to those interested in later
Chinese literary, social, and cultural history, to readers
interested in the history of the book, and to students of early
modern cultural and social theory in comparative context." -Richard
Vinograd, Stanford University
J. P. Park is assistant professor of art history at the
University of Colorado at Boulder.
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