This dissertation addresses intricate intersections among the affective body, global modernity, and literary history in Japanese literature in the early twentieth century, that is, the imperial eras of late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926). Uno Koji (1891-1961) and his best-known novella Kura no naka (1919) afford the gravitation that draws together such disparate topics as hysteria, melancholia, ownership and debt, collecting, and biography into mutually generative constellations. As Uno's ambivalent position within canonical literary history forms a fertile relation with the stylistic experimentalism of the text, the pair presents felicitous events across the epistemological boundary between life and writing, and bodily and literary style. Geared towards properly expanding the horizon of inquiry, this study emphatically pursues the reverberations between Uno and Kura no naka and such varied contemporaries as Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Walter Benjamin, Charlie Chaplin, Natsume Soseki, and Virginia Woolf; and thereby illuminates the ineluctably global milieu that was modernity in the early twentieth century. The discussion closely engages with theoretical writings, drawing most extensively on psychoanalytic approaches in order to account for some of the most intractable questions that have tested the disciplinary limits of modern Japanese literature. Chapter 1 explores hysteria as a fresh conceptual passage for feminist criticism, a provocation to the current preoccupation with ideological investigation which uniformly effaces the body as a differential event. Chapter 2 is a metonymic experiment deriving theoretical prompts from the larger discussion on hysteria in order to vitalize the increasingly expiring notion of shishosetsu in light of postcolonial melancholia. While Chapter 3 magnifies an intimate scene of the two visual subjects transpiring on the precipice of hysteria, Chapter 4 traces the kinetic body within particular narrative-spatial coordinates. Both chapters impel towards the question of the relation to the other, and the world, by way of the narrative. Finally, Chapter 5 attempts to reimagine bio-graphy--differentiated from biography--as a form of literary history new precisely for its being a writing of the body. Overall, the human and objectal figures arising from the study are a call of love attuned by several related mimetic modalities: distance to the intimate other, remembering the mother, and becoming the (m)other.

The Shuihu zhuan, or The Water Margin as it is usually rendered in English, is one of the major vernacular xiaoshuo novels of the Ming dynasty, and continues to be widely read today. Though little is known about its author or the circumstances of the production of its text, it is known that printed editions of it began to appear on the cusp of a major expansion in publishing activity in sixteenth-century China, and that the vernacular fiction genre flourished along with publishing. The Shuihu zhuan is a major example of both this genre and this publishing trend. Yet behind the very familiarity of its received text are a number of editions that served varying functions in their milieus. The aim of this dissertation is to follow the transformations that the Shuihu zhuan underwent as it appeared in these various incarnations as a means of highlighting some of the major shifts in publishing and modes of consumption of vernacular fiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To do so, I employ both historical analysis of the circumstances around the editions' publication and close readings of paratextual materials included in the editions themselves.

Though the novel would later be widely published at the hands of the commercial publishers and has come to be strongly associated with popular and commercial traditions, the earliest editions of the Shuihu zhuan were the products of official and private entities of the Jiajing-era elite. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I contextualize the Shuihu zhuan in this setting and attempt to uncover the social functions a work of the nascent genre of vernacular fiction served within these elite social circles and within the book culture of the era. I examine the overall publishing projects of these entities in order to determine the social space occupied by their output.
							
The following two chapters are concerned with later, commercial editions of the Shuihu zhuan. At the hands of editors and commentators, these editions were transformed in order to meet the tastes of wider audiences. Prefaces and commentaries aimed to shape the way the Shuihu zhuan was read. Secondary scholarship on the traditional fiction commentaries has typically treated them as an early form of exegetical literary criticism and an agent in the elevation of the vernacular fiction genre; in these chapters, I argue that the commentators appropriate elements of the novel in order to express their own ideas. Moreover, I show that by using vernacular fiction as a channel of expression, commentators reached large audiences outside the traditional literati class without governmental interference.

This dissertation examines the historical evolution of Korean print culture by studying the ways in which the reading public expanded its boundary beyond the confines of canonical texts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this dissertation, I analyze the unexpected trajectory of the development of the Korean literary culture, which dynamically diversified its spectrum and encouraged the growth of new authors and readers, despite the powerful controlling mechanisms of the regime: the examinations and the police censorship from 1880 to 1931.

These dynamisms originated from the socio-cultural contexts of the nineteenth century. In Part One, I examine how elite kinship organizations, literati associations, and new religious groups sponsored new cultural activities without the requirement of the classical curriculum for passing the civil service examinations. In the late nineteenth century, these three indigenous institutions, which had accumulated cultural capital, began to access printing, using either the new machine press or old woodblock printing, to present their subcultures to wider audiences. My goal is to show that Korean culture was not homogeneous in the nineteenth century, despite its having looked so under the civil service examinations and police censorship. Korean vernacular language and classical Chinese both contributed to the diversity of literary culture by developing new genres, such as popular literature, pedagogy, statecraft study, and philology.

In Part Two, I investigate how the Korean society responded to powerful impacts from the outside after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The basic goal of Part Two is to contextualize the regime shift from the Chosŏn kingdom to the colonial empire in the context of Korean print culture. Under the Japanese occupation and colonization of Korea, the market economy, public school system, and the colonial empire dramatically transformed what Koreans read and how they wrote. The vernacularization of the literary culture proves that the interaction between the colonial regime and Koreans contained a complexity that cannot be simplified by nationalism. Indigenous writers adapted to the new regime and competed for profit and fame by projecting their books as the new vision of Korea. The complicated cooperation and negotiation between the regime and the society not only illustrates that the unexpected transgressions enriched Korean literary culture, but also suggests that Korean books were at the center of rivaling discourses and imaginations from the 1880s until the early 1930s.

"Spontaneity" is a central albeit problematic concept in Chinese and European aesthetics and ethics. Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101), whose literary and artistic creativity opened a new era in Chinese aesthetics, is regarded as a "natural" and "spontaneous" genius. By examining his life and works, this dissertation aims to reveal the paradoxes and dialectics beneath the ideological construct of "spontaneity." Through close reading, the rhetoric of spontaneity is found to define Su Shi's artistic pursuit, justify his material possession (in the form of connoisseurship), fashion a literary and political persona, and provide religious relief. Further, after rejecting the naïve notion of "spontaneity" as unpremeditated, unintentional, and immediate, I attempt to present a more nuanced understanding of spontaneity that embraces mediacy, including materiality, craft, learning, rules, ritual, and tradition. Such a dialectic notion consistently underlies Su Shi's diverse writings on art and natural beauty and is based upon his theory of human nature.

Throughout this project, close reading is integrated with critical thinking, informed by a range of theories and perspectives. Chinese native intellectual traditions that have influenced Su Shi's thinking are examined as such. Western aesthetic, anthropological, and ethical theories provide systems of reference.The internal logic in Su Shi's thinking on related issues leads my inquiry from the aesthetics of art to the aesthetics of nature, and finally to ethics (defined as the study of the best-lived life). This dissertation is accordingly divided into three parts, each consisting of two chapters.

The first part problematizes the notion of "artistic spontaneity" by analyzing the role and function of art as "skillful means" in the pursuit of enlightenment. Su Shi's understanding of human nature provides a common basis for his theories on artistic and ethical spontaneity alike.The second part discusses how natural beauty is constructed as the paradigm of art and, in this very process, becomes the after-image of art. Su Shi's connoisseur literature on flowers and rocks are examined, and the historical transformations in the cultural meaning of related natural objects are discussed. The third part discusses Su Shi's pursuit of complete spiritual and corporeal spontaneity. He emulated the cultural models of ancient poets and practiced the occult art of Daoist alchemy; in both kinds of activities ritualized behavior and cultural paradigms functioned as medium. Thus his understandings of artistic and ethical spontaneity share the same dialectic model: not only both are mediated, but both mean unimpeded resignation in the course of active and constant self-improvement.

Manchukuo was a state that was established by the Japanese military in Manchuria (Northeast China) in 1932 and collapsed in 1945 with the defeat of Japan. Immediately after its founding, the Japanese Kwantung Army, later joined by the Manchukuo Army, initiated a series of "bandit suppression"(tōbatsu; 討伐) campaigns to consolidate the new regime. This dissertation will focus on "bandit suppression" in Manchukuo as a means of illuminating the state's claims to legitimacy, its ability to mobilize at different levels, and the involvement of "bandit suppression" in other dimensions of state building. By examining how "bandit suppression" was perceived, represented, and practiced in the context of Manchukuo's state building, I will argue that the perception of the "bandit problem" and the practice of suppression campaigns in Manchukuo embodied the state's pursuit of legitimacy. Furthermore, the ideological, administrative, and legal construction of the state, as well the widespread mobilization of different groups of people in the "anti-bandit" campaigns also facilitated the state building process of Manchukuo.

Through the lens of "bandit suppression," I will suggest that the crucial concern of the state was to obtain legitimacy as the foundation of governmental power. Confronted with domestic disorder and the influence of Chinese nationalism, for Manchukuo itself to gain recognition and legitimacy for its continued existence as a state, it had to create a consciousness of its right to govern and the recognition by the governed of that right. Besides, to obtain legitimacy and consolidate state authority also involved "the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society." Therefore, the campaigns against "bandits" were often accompanied by the proclamation of the founding ideas of Manchukuo, including the principles of the "Kingly Way" (ōdō; 王道), "ethnic harmony," and bringing peace and order to the people. In this sense, "bandit suppression" embodied "a state historiographic discourse about order, ordering, justice, and freedom."

This dissertation is the first book-length study to consider the literature, primarily prose narratives, engendered by postwar Japanese authors' encounters with African Americans and African American literature. The dissertation argues that the "blackness" of postwar Japanese fiction is written in two modalities. The first mode fixates on the representation, and thus the imaginary mastery, of black (typically male) bodies. Given the influx of African American soldiers and black culture in Japan evoked by the Allied Occupation, the early postwar period saw an uptick in works written in the first mode, i.e. the postwar novellas of authors such as Ishikawa Jun and Kojima Nobuo. The very influx of black people and culture that catalyzed production in the first mode, however, also served as an impetus for the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This milieu sparked Japanese authors'--Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two such examples--interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to a second mode of writing blackness in Japanese literature. The blackness of literary works written in the second mode arises not by virtue of the representation of black characters, but by virtue of the works' investment in the possibility of writing Japanese literature that has black literature and history in its intertextual and contextual networks.

Whereas previous scholarship itself has fixated on the first mode, this dissertation amalgamates textual analysis and literary historical investigation in order to fully delineate the rich history of black-Japanese literary exchange and bimodal writing of blackness in Japanese literature  Through five case studies that progress chronologically from Ishikawa Jun's "Ōgon densetsu" (The Legend of Gold, 1946) to Yamada Eimi's Payday!!! (2003), this dissertation both reconsiders postwar Japanese literary representations of blackness and argues that black-Japanese literary exchange created a vein of modern Japanese literature shaped by Japanese authors' interpretations of blackness and black fiction.

In this dissertation I set out to question the status of the Analects (Lunyu 論語, or The Selected Sayings) as the most authoritative source of Confucius's teachings and, in the process, to rethink Confucius's place in early Chinese intellectual history.

Part one is a roadmap to the thousands of Confucius sayings preserved in the early corpus. It includes an in-depth discussion of Confucius quotation markers as well as a comprehensive list of texts that quote Confucius. In the course of the chapter, I argue that Confucius quotation before the advent of the <italic>Analects</italic> was a dynamic, creative practice in which authors treated Confucius sayings as venues for the re-performance of inherited wisdom.
							
Part two presents the main argument for revising the dating of the Analects based on a reverse chronological survey of Confucius quotation practice in the early period. I conclude the chapter with the argument that the Analects was compiled between the 150s and 130s BCE, roughly three centuries later than the traditional account would have it.
							
Part three brings the focus back to the <italic>Analects</italic> itself to read the text as a product of a Western Han political, intellectual, and textual milieu. The chapter develops as a series of nine case studies, each of which identifies a different compilation strategy employed by the <italic>Analects<italic> compilers. 
							
In a concluding chapter, I synthesize the arguments of the first three parts and discuss the implications of my findings for the study of early Chinese thought. In an epilogue, I also develop one concrete scenario for the creation of a Western Han <italic>Analects</italic>.

The term prose poetry has been used to describe works of literature in China ever since the term was translated into Chinese in 1918. This dissertation studies that act of generic naming, as well as the formal practices that the term most consistently describes. Its methodology combines genre study, literary history, analysis of the literary field, and close reading.

The dissertation finds that Chinese prose poetry is most aptly described not as a static category made up of measurable qualities of shape, size or sound, but instead as the result of a series of compositional and conceptual processes, most important of which are condensation, recitation, and refusal.  It further finds that Chinese prose poetry before 1949 is neither similar to prose poetry after 1949, nor similar to itself: strong generic and formal identities appeared later, as a result of prose poetry's process of self-justification during the literary-political transformations of the Hundred Flowers period (1956-7).  Contemporary official prose poetry, which has been published and disseminated widely since the early 1980s, therefore maintains a strong generic and formal identity, and continues to have many characteristics of socialist literature.  Meanwhile, avant-garde poets who work in prose forms have defined their work in contradistinction to politically orthodox work, and often avoid the category of prose poetry even when their works have formal and procedural affinities with other prose poems.
							
Finally, this dissertation is an anthology of translations.  Artists translated include Ke Lan, Guo Feng, Liu Zaifu and Ouyang Jianghe. Due to copyright restrictions, these poems have been redacted from the online version of the dissertation. A complete copy is available at the Mudd Documents Library, 26 Olden St., Princeton NJ 08540.

Building off scholarship which has shown extensive and significant connections between the poetry of Six Dynasties China (220-589) and Heian Japan (794-1185), my dissertation takes an important step forward in rereading Heian literature vis-à-vis its Chinese antecedents. In past work, the "Chinese influence" of Japanese literature has served as the primary analytical framework to understand how the two relate to one another and has helped identify specific instances of textual borrowing of Chinese sources in Japanese texts. While granting the importance of such identifications, my dissertation argues that the use of "influence" has nonetheless failed to account for important textual continuities between Chinese and Japanese literature which exceed the usual scope of identifying distinct instances of borrowing. As an alternative, my dissertation introduces genealogy as a framework for reading Heian poetry alongside Six Dynasties poetry and focuses in particular upon wordplay, double-entendre, and figural language. Through a genealogical framework, my dissertation argues for a widespread and largely unnoted use of related erotic wordplay from the Yutai xinyong (comp. ca. 530), a major anthology of Six Dynasties poetry, to two seminal Heian texts, the Kokinwakash (comp. 905) and Genji monogatari (comp. ca. 1008). By reading the texts through their genealogies, my dissertation presents a case for thinking of East Asian literary texts beyond the limited frameworks of "Chinese" or "Japanese" literature.

This dissertation examines religion and warrior culture during Japan's sixteenth century. It views the period from the perspective of the Otomo warrior band, which provides an ideal case study, because its members supported not only cultic sites established for the veneration of traditional gods (kami) and buddhas (hotoke), but also ones for the Christian God (Deus) as well. It demonstrates how the incorporation of Christianity's innovative and disruptive elements into the military organization affected Japan's encounter with Europeans and Christianity. In particular, it connects the initial acceptance and eventual rejection of missionary efforts to issues of religious practice.

The career of Otomo Sorin (1530-1587) illustrates the potential for change that Christianity brought to Japan after it was introduced in 1549. The leader of the Otomo warrior band first embraced Buddhism as a lay monk in 1562, and then was baptized as a Catholic in 1578, before finally experiencing a postmortem reversion back to Buddhism at the hands of his son in 1587. On the one hand, he represents the religious stance of a typical military leader; during most of his life he patronized multiple temples and shrines in order to align himself strategically with important religious and political centers, while also seeking to mobilize the deities housed at these sites to support him. On the other hand, he was a visionary; in the last decade of his life he retired and attempted to establish a Christian kingdom in Japan that would operate according to Western customs without the assistance of gods and buddhas. Previous research on Japan's sixteenth century has focused on the commercial interests of Christian lords like him in order to account for the initial appeal of the foreign faith. It has also emphasized the ideological fears that authoritarian warlords had of organized religion in order to explain their later rejection of it. Yet, scholarship thus far has had little to say about religious practice. Through an exploration of conditions in the Otomo warrior band, this dissertation exposes some of the relatively unexplored religious fault lines that could disrupt military organizations.

The military in early nineteenth century China (1800-1840) has often been portrayed as an institution in steep decline, its troops addicted to opium and its officers incompetent and corrupt. This dissertation argues that the narrative of decline has overshadowed significant changes in the relation between military and society during the same period. These changes were shaped most profoundly by the White Lotus War (1796-1804), a major conflict between the Qing dynasty and White Lotus sectarians in central China.

Many of the most neglected effects of the White Lotus War emerged through the deaths and lives of its military participants. In the decades after the war, the tens of thousands of Chinese war dead and military veterans, most of them members of the Green Standard branch of the Qing military, became the focus of cultural practices across the empire. These men are the main subjects of the dissertation. Chapters 2 to 4 explore the commemoration and representation of the Chinese war dead, with case studies on the construction of prefectural Manifest Loyalty Shrines, the issuing and reception of hereditary titles to officers killed in battle, and the writing and compilation of nonofficial and official biographies. Chapters 5 to 7 look at the veterans of the war, men who took advantage of loosening state control over discourse on military topics to tell their own stories and were, in turn, the objects of fascination at many levels of society.

The cultural practices discussed in the dissertation emerged at the intersection of state initiatives, cultural tradition, representational space, and personal history. They were a sign of both the hegemony of ideas about the state and the limits of the Qing state as a system. I suggest that the early nineteenth century state took on the role of a cultural authority, authorizing certain sites and symbols related to war as legitimate objects of cultural practice, but increasingly unable or unwilling to directly choreograph war commemoration and military spectacle. The elaborate and top-down production of military culture that had been typical of the Qianlong reign (1736-1795) gave way under the Jiaqing emperor (1796-1820) to diverse practices organized but not controlled by the state.

"Kara kagami" (The Mirror of China) is something of an enigma--only six of an original ten scrolls survive, and there is no critical edition with comprehensive annotation or previous translation. A work composed for Imperial Prince-cum-Shogun Munetaka by the scion of a distinguished line of Confucian scholars, Fujiwara no Shigenori, on a topic of pressing interest in the thirteenth century--the fate of Continental China--it embodies many of the characteristic concerns of Kamakura Japan. Tensions between privatization and circulation of learning, imperial and warrior authority, Japan's envisioning of China and her relations thereto, as well as a larger cosmological narrative all run through the work. Yet they do so ways that challenge now long-held ideas of language, stance towards the Continent and its traditions, and narratives of generic development and resistance.

This dissertation explores the ways in which "The Mirror of China" defies familiar-yet-passé conceptions of medieval Japan. It examines afresh how three issues in medieval discourse--language selection, portrayals of China, and narrating Japan--are refracted in "The Mirror of China" in order to better understand text-based claims of political, cultural, and philosophical authority. "The Mirror of China"'s linguistically diverse manuscripts invite question of the worldviews or allegiances of identity a multilingual text can intimate. Its depiction of China and the implied narratives such a vision creates likewise differ markedly from those of contemporary works. And lastly, the linguistic and thematic innovation it brings to the Heian genre of "Mirror" writing marks a previously obscured turning point in medieval historiographic writing, one that allows an appreciation of the genre as a medieval experiment in crafting histories as legitimating narratives. Drawing on multiple understudied works in addition to better-known writings, this dissertation provides a new understanding of how medieval thinkers exploited languages, images, and traditions in order to create their own visions of authority.

This dissertation examines the trajectory of Japan's aviation from its birth in 1910 until 1937, when, on the eve of war with China, Japanese military aviation matched and in many aspects even surpassed that of the West. In particular this study, which draws predominantly on archival material from Japan and Germany, seeks to demonstrate that German influence on Japan's aviation became dominant by the mid-1920s and continued for a decade. German assistance prepared Japanese engineers for the important transition from imitation to independent design. It also profoundly reshaped the Japanese military's air fleet and air strategy.

The 1919 Versailles Treaty drew the attention of the Japanese to the high standard of German aviation technology when it granted the Japanese free access to German factories and military facilities. These visits, together with the arrival of German war trophy aircraft in Japan, prompted the Japanese to purchase German airplanes and production licenses and to invite German engineers to Japan to educate a new generation of Japanese aircraft designers.

German aircraft manufacturers became instrumental in the rise of the Imperial Japanese Navy's air power. German hardware and know-how laid the foundation for the design and production of flying boats and carrier airplanes. These state-of the-art aircraft substantially enhanced the navy's strike force and emboldened its air strategists to embrace a technology-driven hawkishness.

With the help of German aviation specialists the Imperial Japanese Army also modernized its air squadrons. During the 1931 invasion of Manchuria the army deployed some of the world's most advanced military aircraft. Yet, the successes of these airplanes made the army's planners complacent. They drifted into a doctrinal slumber that paid little attention to the further development of an advanced air strategy.

Shifting the focus from aircraft design toward aircraft production, the dissertation also addresses the limits of German influence. The Japanese were aware of the advances in Germany's production technology. However, the military's emphasis on aircraft with ever higher performance and the industry's continuing reliance on small subcontractors took a heavy toll on productivity. An industry that built world-class fighters and bombers was ill-prepared to produce them efficiently in large numbers.

The present work treats the Manchu script’s influence on language studies in Qīng China, roughly covering the period 1607–1911. The Manchu script, which had its roots in the Near East, was used to write the language of the Qīng ruling house and parts of its hereditary military elite. The Qīng empire emerged as a regional power in Northeast Asia in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and subsequently ruled China and parts of Inner Asia from the mid-seventeenth century until 1912, when a republic replaced it in China and parts of the other former imperial possessions.

This study argues that Qīng thinkers theorized the Manchu script in reference to ideas from the Inner Asian and partially Buddhist Chinese traditions. As such, the Manchu script formed the basis of a distinct method of serial lexicographic arrangement, eventually applied also to Chinese corpora, and heavily influenced how speech sounds were transcribed across writing systems in Chinese and Manchu dictionaries, thesauri, and language manuals. The study demonstrates this thesis by discussing the development of elementary Manchu language pedagogy, lexicography, and phonology.

The dissertation introduces the languages historically spoken and written in China; gives an overview of education in imperial China and traces the development of Chinese lexicography and phonology as disciplines before the late imperial period; describes the history of script creation in Inner Asia, including in Manchuria; discusses the Manchu bureaucracy, education, and publishing in China in the period of Manchu rule; presents the history of the Manchu syllabary; traces the development of Manchu dictionaries as tools for managing information; argues how the encounter with the Manchu script compelled Chinese scholars to develop new methods of indicating the pronunciation of Chinese characters; and, finally, shows that the Manchu script came to be used to clarify the pronunciation of the emerging standard Chinese language of Mandarin. An appendix problematizes and traces how European scholars came to think of the Manchu script not as a syllabary, as they thought of it in China, but as an alphabet similar to the European script.

This dissertation tracks three interrelated developments at a local level: the origins of pearl cultivation in the Japanese empire, the rise of European machine-mediated gemological testing designed to identify “cultured” pearls from Japan, and the contentious transformation of the cultured pearl into a ubiquitous object of adornment in the United States. It argues that Japanese pearl cultivation and the products of pearl cultivation redrew distinctions between nature and culture in the twentieth-century world. Its structure comes from the company controlled by a figure later known inside and outside the Japanese empire as the “Pearl King.”

Some of the Japanese empire’s largest farms appeared not on land, but in the water. At the turn of the twentieth century, a Japanese man named Mikimoto Kōkichi began to raise living shellfish and surgically manipulate them in order to produce pearls for export. In the formal terms of imperial Japanese industrial property and fisheries law, pearl oysters became ownable creatures that were susceptible to tinkering and capable of producing pearls on demand. Wide-ranging kinship, labor, patronage, and property relationships supported Mikimoto’s reputation as an individual whose business was raising shellfish and selling the pearls they were made to produce. Mikimoto made the first exclusive ownership claims over pearl oysters, their habitats, and their productive capabilities, but those same moves resulted in legal and extralegal disputes with fishers and other would-be cultivators in Japan. The advantages of monopoly and monoculture also revealed social and ecological fissures amid constant battles to keep human and non-human interlopers out of individually-claimed ocean space.

From the early 1920s onward, pearl dealers in Paris and London attempted to create and enforce distinctions between pearls cultivated in the Japanese empire and the “oriental” pearls that they themselves bought and sold. Members of Europe’s largest pearl wholesaler associations turned the “Japanese pearl” into an issue of legal demarcation, product testing, and advertising rhetoric. Despite claiming to be connoisseurs of surfaces, anti-cultivation wholesalers began to argue that a pearl’s value could be ascertained only after an examination of its internal structure. European pearl dealers tried to shore up trust between buyers and sellers by shedding light on what they saw as the innate differences between a natural and a cultured object. Years of legal and scientific debate resulted in a transnational system for separating “cultured” pearls from “natural” ones.

Markets for “natural” and “cultured” pearls changed dramatically amid the global repercussions of post-1929 financial crisis and post-1931 Japanese aggression on the Asian mainland. A standard view in the historiography of the Persian Gulf region is that Japanese pearl cultivation decimated the region’s hitherto dominant pearl economy as its oil economy was taking shape. This dissertation argues that mass pearl cultivation was a contradictory response to a rising number of cultivators in 1930s Japan. Mikimoto tried to control competing Japanese pearl production through the use of patent-sharing agreements, even as his own farms processed more shellfish than ever before.

The 1920s European battles over pearl nomenclature moved to a new and different field in the interwar United States. In New York City, the world’s largest post World War I market for pearls and precious stones, the affordability of cultured pearl necklaces became part of gendered depression-era appeals by Mikimoto’s salesmen—and newly arrived American cultured pearl dealers—to entice American women to purchase objects of adornment rather than objects of investment.

Even as Mikimoto made claims to intervene in the lives of marine shellfish in order to produce more pearls, his claims fueled clashes over how, and by whom, those interventions and products would be controlled and represented. Precisely because there were multiple and often competing meanings of cultivation, relationships between humans and mollusks—as well as the products that resulted from them—became flashpoints of conflict on land and sea.

This dissertation explores how people living in the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) dealt with illness. Doctor-based care has most often captured the attention of historians, but the proportion of time doctors physically spent with patients was dwarfed by that provided by domestic caregivers. To elucidate the medical landscape of Edo and describe how urban residents cared for sick family members, I draw from a rich body of family records. These include more than a dozen diaries and over fifty family records written between 1750 and 1868, composed by men and women of diverse social status and occupation such as samurai, commoners, popular authors, and doctors.

Chapter One illustrates how day-to-day management of illness was implemented by family members rather than by medical practitioners, demonstrating the key role of women as mobile caregivers and the ways in which illness bound families together. Chapter Two examines what sufferers consumed when they fell ill, revealing the importance of adjusting diet, self-medicating, and record keeping within the home. Chapter Three depicts the role of religious sites and therapies in the lives of Edo residents, showing the importance of family members’ prayer by proxy.

Against this backdrop of therapeutic options, Chapter Four explores how families interacted with medical practitioners by using the records of three Edo physicians to trace their daily routines. Diaries of families who hired physicians show that they often saw several doctors over the course of a single illness. Seeing a doctor was not a binary relationship between patient and practitioner but an enterprise that mobilized multiple family members. Chapter Five argues that illness in late Tokugawa Japan was a social event on the scale of weddings or births—one that could bring dozens of visitors to the home, all bringing gifts. In total, this dissertation contends that health care in early modern Japan was rooted in the family, and that the patterns of therapeutic practice seen in early modern diaries were fundamentally shaped by familial participation in illness management.

In traditional narrative of Chinese literary history, Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) is arguably the “greatest poet of China,” and it was in the Song 宋 (960-1279) that his greatness was finally recognized. This narrative naturally presumes that the real Du Fu in history is completely accessible to us, which is not necessarily true.

This dissertation provides another perspective to understand Du Fu and the “greatness” of his poetry. I emphasize that the image of Du Fu that we now have is more of a persona that has been constructed from his available poetic texts. Poets in the Song Dynasty, especially those in the eleventh century, took initiative to construct this persona, and their construction of Du Fu was largely conditioned by their own literary and intellectual concerns.

The entire dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 investigates how Du Fu’s poetic collection emerged. His collection, as it was compiled and edited, not only provided a platform, but also set restrictions, for the construction of Du Fu. Chapter 2 examines how Du Fu used to be remembered before his collection took form. Memory of him before the eleventh century was considerably different from his received image. The remaining chapters focus on three major aspects of Du Fu’s persona – namely his images as a poet-historian, a master of poetic craft, and a Confucian poet – to analyze how and why Du Fu was constructed as such in the Song. Song poets accepted poetry as a medium loaded with valuable information, and they thus explored Du Fu’s poetry for history; they concerned themselves with issues pertaining to poetic craft, and retrospectively looked for examples in Du Fu’s poetry as established standards; they, as scholar-officials, committed themselves to the state, and declared Du Fu as their model. In sum, Song poets provided particular readings to Du Fu’s particular poems, and claimed these readings as the result of Du Fu’s intentional production. Through interpretation of Du Fu’s surviving poems, they constructed Du Fu as China’s greatest poet.

Abstract

This dissertation charts the movement of knowledge of the natural world from the Islamicate world to China, and its subsequent transformations by local Chinese scholars. It argues that the study of Arabo-Persian texts constituted an important channel of knowledge transmission, connecting China to Western scholarly traditions.

At this dissertation's core stands a movement of Chinese Muslim literati that emerged in the late-sixteenth century and promoted the study of Arabo-Persian texts. By importing methods of philological investigation from the Islamicate world, the movement sought to highlight knowledge of the subtleties and operations of the natural world embedded in Arabo-Persian texts.

This study investigates the effects that China's socio-political environment had in shaping the forms of accommodation of Arabo-Persian knowledge. It discusses the utilitarian policies of the Yuan and early Ming dynasties that facilitated an early wave of transmission of specialized knowledge in fields such as astronomy, astrology and medicine to China, yet restricted the accommodation of Arabo-Persian philosophies of nature; advances the claim that the socio-political circumstances during the late-fifteenth century, characterized by the erosion of traditional Confusian ideology's authority and the popularization of knowledge, provided suitable conditions for the accommodation of foreign knowledge and paved the way for the rise of a scholarly movement interested in the study of Arabic and Persian texts; surveys the rise of Islamic literature in translation and the genre of Chinese expositions on Islamic themes that emerged in the mid-17th century, resulting from pressures from the non-Muslim learned community and the efforts of Islamic scholars to widen their audience; and finally, it suggests that adverse socio-political conditions for Islamic scholarship emerged during the 18th century, and led to its breakdown.

Through an analysis of the Persian and Arabic texts that circulated in China during the 16th to 18th centuries, this dissertation demonstrates the variety, richness, and unique features of the collection. Further, it discuses the effects of translation and printing on the accommodation of Arabo-Persian knowledge of the natural world in China.

This dissertation focuses on the religious commitments of the Peng clan of Suzhou. From the early to mid-Qing dynasty (1644-1911) the Pengs were arguably the most successful corporate lineage in the entire empire in terms of civil examination performance. They were also pioneers of a charitable style of status justification in which the Pengs explained their worldly success as divine reward for their good works. By the early eighteenth century, many of the Pengs’ peers and social inferiors promulgated their claims as well. In the thriving genre of morality books (shanshu) particularly successful Peng patriarchs served as iconic shorthand for the terrestrial reward of civil examination success for philanthropic acts. Examination hopefuls and morality book consumers throughout the empire sought to obtain a portion of the prosperity of the Pengs by emulating their charitable commitments.

Drawing on source materials ranging from autobiographies and genealogies to the transcripts of spirit-writing sessions, I focus my study on the pivotal figure of Peng Dingqiu (1645-1719). Dingqiu’s 1676 optimus distinction and self-presentational strategy were critical in the consolidation of the concrete and symbolic power of the Peng lineage. Exploring the role of spirit-writing altars in intra-elite relations, I argue that Dingqiu’s claim of a prophecy of his civil examination success had wide ranging consequences for his descendants and his own posthumous persona. In documenting the collective devotional commitments of the Peng lineage in realms such as a tower complex devoted to the deity Wenchang and local Daoist institutions, I provide a nuanced portrait of elite religiosity and its impact on the late imperial cityscape. Simultaneously, I use attention to the familial lineage in order to explain the centrality of religious modes of discourse in elite self-organization.
							
A descriptive catalog of works by Peng lineage members from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries illustrates the scope of members’ cultural impact and provides a basis for understanding how successive generations represented their ancestors through editorial and publishing endeavors.

The eighteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion of the Qing realm, and this study examines how some of these changes were reflected onto imperial medicine at the center. Institutional history suggests that one aspect was the representation of people from different backgrounds in imperial medical posts. Dynamic changes in the structure and function of medical organizations point to the value of examining the breadth of medical knowledge and practices under the authority of the emperor during this time. Qing imperial medicine was pluralistic with respect to institutions, posts, medicines, languages, and medical conceptions. Multiplicity, as a principle and a practical solution, facilitated continuity, representation, as well as the integration of medical organizations with those of bureaucratic nature. Within such a context, having the ability to mobilize a range of medical practitioners could also serve to increase the power of the rulership.

Imperial medicine in China was greatly restructured during the eighteenth century. The Imperial Pharmacy, which had been part of the Imperial Medical Bureau, gained relative independence before being integrated into the Imperial Household Department, where its functions expanded. During this time, the Imperial Medical Bureau became more distant from the Ministry of Rites with which it had been affiliated, and was increasingly overseen by the Imperial Household Department. Organizational plurality could be found beyond these examples. A class of specialty bonesetters at an institution that managed imperial horses reflected the overlapping spheres of human and equine medicine.

The organization of medicine provided space for individual cultural and practical spheres while also allowing for interaction. The study of plurality in imperial medical institutions reveals a variety of human actors, as well as the role of mobility in the day-to-day functioning of medical affairs. Moreover, the multi-lingual context of the Qing points to the value of considering the various meanings of a particular term or name across a spectrum of languages.

Multiplicity was also exhibited through the differing conceptions of the body in three imperially commissioned textual sources: a five-language dictionary, a Manchu manuscript on anatomy that was a “translation” of a Western treatise, and a text for establishing medical orthodoxy. The latter was widely distributed, and a part of it found a new life in Japan, thereby showing how imperial medicine existed far beyond the palace gates, including the social history of medicine within a wider East Asian context.