By shedding light on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished in North China during the Mongol Empire, or Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), Genealogy and Status explores the ways the conquered Chinese people understood and represented the alien Mongol ruling principles through their own cultural tradition. This epigraphic genre, which this book collectively calls “genealogical steles,” was quite unique in the history of Chinese epigraphy. Northern Chinese officials commissioned these steles exclusively to record a family’s extensive genealogy, rather than the biography or achievements of an individual. Tomoyasu Iiyama shows how the rise of these steles demonstrates that Mongol rule fundamentally affected how northern Chinese families defined, organized, and commemorated their kinship. Because most of these inscriptions are in Classical Chinese, they appear to be part of Chinese tradition. In fact, they reflect a massive social change in Chinese society that occurred because of Mongol rule in China. The evolution of genealogical steles delineates how local elites, while thinking of themselves as the heirs of traditional Chinese culture, fully accommodated to Mongol imperial rule and became instead one of its cornerstones in eastern Eurasia.

This book offers the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the origins and development of China’s genealogy, as well as its fundamental role in eugenics, ethics, politics and culture throughout China’s history. This book is divided into two parts: chronological research and thematic research. The first part explains the definition, origin, birth, development, transformation, optimization, popularization and contemporary status of China’s genealogy, while the second addresses its styles, content, quantity, family names, format and value, illustrations, functions and other related issues. The book, for the first time in China’s genealogy, proposes several new concepts and perspectives, such as dividing the history of China’s genealogy into seven stages; redefining genealogy; and analyses of the transformation, popularization and value of China’s genealogy. Given its scope, the book offers a groundbreaking and authoritative resource for a broad readership.

Genealogy and Social Status in the Enlightenment is at the crossroads of the history of science and the social history of cultural practices, and suggests the need for a new approach on the significance of genealogies in the Age of Enlightenment. While their importance has been fully recognised and extensively studied in early modern Britain and in the Victorian period, the long eighteenth century has been too often presented as a black hole regarding genealogy. Enlightened values and urban sociability have been presented as inimical to the praise of ancestry and birth. In contrast, however, various studies on the continental or in the American colonies, have shed light on the many uses of genealogies, even beyond the landed elite. Whether it be in the publishing industry, in the urban corporations, in the scientific discourses, genealogy was used, not only as a resilient social practice, but also as a form of reasoning, a language and a tool to include newcomers, organise scientific and historical knowledge or to express various emotions. This volume aims to reconsider the flexibility of genealogical practices and their perpetual reconfiguration to meet renewed expectations in the period. Far from slowly vanishing under the blows of rationalism that would have delegitimized an ancient world based on various forms of hereditary determinism, the different contributions to this collective work demonstrate that genealogy is a pervasive tool to make sense of a fast-changing society. Stephane Jettot is Assistant Professor at Sorbonne University. His research focuses on several subjects related to the British Isles in the 17th and 18th centuries. His first book considered the importance of the London Parliament in Late Stuarts diplomacy (Représenter le Roi ou la Nation? Les parlementaires dans la diplomatie anglaise. (1660-1702), Sorbonne UP, 2012). Together with other European scholars, he has explored the relation between genealogies and collective memories in various publications, notably S. Jettot, The Genealogical Enterprise: Social Practices and Collective Imagination in Europe (15th-20th century) with Marie Lezowski, Peter Lang, 2016. Dr. Jean-Paul Zuniga is a professor of History at EHESS, Paris, where he specializes in Spanish Imperial history. His research first focused on Spanish migration to colonial America and on the meaning of notions such as blood, lineage and “race” in an imperial context. He currently works on urban workers in Hispanic America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This book offers the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the origins and development of China's genealogy, as well as its fundamental role in eugenics, ethics, politics and culture throughout China's history. This book is divided into two parts: chronological research and thematic research. The first part explains the definition, origin, birth, development, transformation, optimization, popularization and contemporary status of China's genealogy, while the second addresses its styles, content, quantity, family names, format and value, illustrations, functions and other related issues. The book, for the first time in China's genealogy, proposes several new concepts and perspectives, such as dividing the history of China's genealogy into seven stages; redefining genealogy; and analyses of the transformation, popularization and value of China's genealogy. Given its scope, the book offers a groundbreaking and authoritative resource for a broad readership.

Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud offers a new perspective on perhaps the most important religious text of the Jewish tradition. It is widely recognized that the creators of the Talmud innovatively interpreted and changed the older traditions on which they drew. Nevertheless, it has been assumed that the ancient rabbis were committed to maintaining continuity with the past. Moulie Vidas argues on the contrary that structural features of the Talmud were designed to produce a discontinuity with tradition, and that this discontinuity was part and parcel of the rabbis' self-conception. Both this self-conception and these structural features were part of a debate within and beyond the Jewish community about the transmission of tradition. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud, produced in the rabbinic academies of late ancient Mesopotamia, Vidas analyzes key passages to show how the Talmud's creators contrasted their own voice with that of their predecessors. He also examines Zoroastrian, Christian, and mystical Jewish sources to reconstruct the debates and wide-ranging conversations that shaped the Talmud's literary and intellectual character.

As a volatile meeting point of personal and public experience, autobiography exists in a mutually influential relationship with the literature, history, private writings, and domestic practices of a society. This book illuminates the ways evolving class and gender identities interact with these inherited forms of narrative to produce the testimony of a culture confronting to its own demise. Elizabeth Grubgeld places Irish autobiography within the ever-widening conversation about the nature of autobiographical writing and contributes to contemporary discussions regarding Irish identity. Her emphasis on women's autobiographies provides a further reexamination of gender relations in Ireland. While serving as the first critical history of its subject, this book also offers a theoretical and interpretive reading of Anglo-Irish culture that gives full attention to class, gender, and genre analysis. It examines autobiographies, letters, and diaries from the late eighteenth century through the present, with primary attention to works produced since World War I. By examining many previously neglected texts, Grubgeld both recovers lost voices and demonstrates how their work can revise our understanding of such major literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, John Synge, Elizabeth Bowen, and Louis MacNiece.

Offers essays demonstrating the critical relevance of Irigaray’s thought of sexual difference for addressing contemporary ethical and social issues. Engaging the World explores Luce Irigaray’s writings on sexual difference, deploying the resources of her work to rethink philosophical concepts and commitments and expose new possibilities of vitality in relationship to nature, others, and to one’s self. The contributors present a range of perspectives from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, literature, education, evolutionary theory, sound technology, science and technology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. They place Irigaray in conversation with thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, René Decartes, and Avital Ronell. While every essay challenges Irigaray’s thought in some way, each one also reveals the transformative effects of her thought across multiple domains of contemporary life.

Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.

This classic work on colonial Southern families contains hundreds of genealogies giving names; dates of birth, marriage, and death; names of children and their offspring, with dates and places of birth, marriage and death; names of collateral connections; places of residence; biographical highlights; and war records. Over 12,000 individuals are referred to in the text, all of them easily located in the alphabetical index.

Not a verse-by-verse treatment, Knofel Staton has focused more on the main ideas of the Scripture being studied, producing a work that is surprisingly comprehensive and uncomplicated as it answers the questions you want answered.