Knowledge Is pleasure [[electronic resource] ] : a life of Florence Ayscough / / Lindsay Shen

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910462873303321
• Autore: Shen Lindsay
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Hong Kong, : Hong Kong University Press, 2012
• ISBN: 988-8180-20-7; 988-220-414-7; 1-283-87384-2; 988-220-881-9
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (x, 161 p. ) : ill. (some col.)
• Collana: RAS China in Shanghai series
• Disciplina: 951.04092
• Soggetti: Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Shanghailanders Guns, gardens and long-gone houses -- Images The tastemaker -- Words The 'sensuous realist' -- Gardens and the grass hut 'A liberal education' -- After China holding open the door.
• Sommario/riassunto: Florence Ayscough -- poet, translator, Sinologist, Shanghailander, "sensual realist", avid collector, pioneering photographer and early feminist champion of women's rights in China. Ayscough's modernist translations of the classical poets still command respect, her ethnographic studies of the lives of Chinese women still engender feminist critiques over three quarters of a century later and her collections of Chinese ceramics and objets now form an important part of several American museums' Asian art collections. Raised in Shanghai in an archetypal family in the late nineteenth century, Ayscough was to become anything but a typical foreigner in China. Encouraged by the New England poet Amy Lowell, she became a much sought-after translator in the early years of the new century, not least for her radical interpretations of the Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu published by the renowned literary critic Harriet Monroe. She later moved on to record China and particularly Chinese women using the new technology of photography, turn the Royal Asiatic Society's Shanghai library into the best on the China Coast and build several impressive collections ; featuring jars from the Dowager Empress Ci Xi, Ming and Qing ceramics. By the time of her death, Florence Ayscough left a legacy of collecting and scholarship unrivalled by any other foreign woman in China before or since. In this biography, Lindsay Shen recovers Ayscough for posterity and returns her to us as a woman of amazing intellectual vibrancy and strength.

From madrigal to opera [[electronic resource] ] : Monteverdi's staging of the self / / Mauro Calcagno

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910789945903321
• Autore: Calcagno Mauro P
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley, California : , : University of California Press, , 2012
• ISBN: 1-280-10874-6; 9786613520661; 0-520-95152-2
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (343 pages)
• Collana: ACLS Fellows' Publications.
• Disciplina: 782.0092
• Soggetti: Petrarchism
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One. La Musica and Orfeo -- Part Two. Constructing the Narrator -- Part Three. Staging the Self -- Epilogue: Subjectivity, Theatricality, Multimediality -- Appendix 1: Tables of Contents of the Madrigal Books -- Appendix 2: Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda: Text and Translation -- Notes -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Mauro Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. Calcagno traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch's love poetry arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not ; only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view.