1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910790187203321

Autore

Edgerton-Tarpley Kathryn <1970->

Titolo

Tears from iron [[electronic resource] ] : cultural responses to famine in nineteenth-century China / / Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley ; with a foreword by Cormac Ó Gráda

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, 2008

ISBN

0-520-93422-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (360 p.)

Collana

Asia : local studies/global themes ; ; 15

Disciplina

363.80951/09034

Soggetti

Famines - China - History - 19th century

China Social conditions 1644-1912

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 (p. 301-317) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Shanxi, greater China, and the famine -- Experiencing the famine : the hierarchy of suffering in a famine song from Xiezhou -- The wrath of heaven versus human greed -- Qing officialdom and the politics of famine -- Views from the outside : science, railroads, and laissez-faire economics -- Hybrid voices : the famine and Jiangnan activism -- Family and gender in famine -- The "feminization of famine" and the feminization of nationalism -- Eating culture : cannibalism and the semiotics of starvation, 1870-2001 -- Epilogue. New tears for new times : the famine revisited.

Sommario/riassunto

This multi-layered history of a horrific famine that took place in late-nineteenth-century China focuses on cultural responses to trauma. The massive drought/famine that killed at least ten million people in north China during the late 1870's remains one of China's most severe disasters and provides a vivid window through which to study the social side of a nation's tragedy. Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley's original approach explores an array of new source materials, including songs, poems, stele inscriptions, folklore, and oral accounts of the famine from Shanxi Province, its epicenter. She juxtaposes these narratives with central government, treaty-port, and foreign debates over the meaning of the events and shows how the famine, which occurred during a period of deepening national crisis, elicited widely divergent reactions from different levels of Chinese society.