The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West (Global Asias) - Hardcover

Ma, Ning

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190606568 ISBN 13: 9780190606565

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

The Age of Silver 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, Ning Ma 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. The main texts addressed within include The Plum in the Golden Vase (China), Don Quixote (Spain), The Life of an Amorous Man (Japan), and Robinson Crusoe (England). 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. The Age of Silver 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.

About this title

About the Author

Ning Ma is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Tufts University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0190606568
• ISBN 13: 9780190606565
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 274