Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China (Modern Language Initiative Books) - Hardcover

Schonebaum, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295995181 ISBN 13: 9780295995182

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2016

Synopsis

By examining the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine, Novel Medicine demonstrates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge in China, beginning in the sixteenth century. Critical readings of fictional and medical texts provide a counterpoint to prevailing narratives that focus only on the “literati” aspects of the novel, showing that these texts were not merely read, but were used by a wide variety of readers for a range of purposes. The intersection of knowledge―fictional and real, elite and vernacular―illuminates the history of reading and daily life and challenges us to rethink the nature of Chinese literature.

About this title

Review:

Groundbreaking. . . . Explores not only the textual interplay of novel medicine and medical fiction, but also their roles as important literary genres in disseminating vernacular knowledge about health, illness, healing, and the body.

Author: Robert E. Hegel Source: Nan Nu: Men, Women, & Gender in China

Offers exciting new literary and historical methods for unraveling the many intersections between medicine and literature that should be of great interest to readers engaged with the medical humanities, the cultural history of medicine, and late imperial Chinese history.

Author: Marta Hanson Source: Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

Novel Medicine is an innovative comparison of medical lore and fictional practice. . . . This is an important study, one that should be read by anyone seriously interested in late imperial Chinese culture; it demonstrates the interactions between realms of knowledge that modern specialized fields so easily overlook.

Author: Harry Yi-Jui Wu Source: Medical History

Like an early Chinese novel, Andrew Schonebaum’s book Novel Medicine both informs and titillates. . . . This is innovative scholarship. . . . Schonebaum’s expansive conception and meticulous research make Novel Medicine an eye-opening read, one that I particularly recommend to historians of medicine and of gender and sexuality.

Author: Hilary A. Smith Source: Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Review:

Novel Medicine, by bringing together disparate material in a novel way, sheds new and interesting light on traditional Chinese medicine, vernacular literature, and society.

Author: David Rolston, author of Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0295995181
• ISBN 13: 9780295995182
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296