The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts

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Author :
Publisher : Chinese University Press
ISBN 13 : 9789622017498
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (174 download)

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Book Synopsis The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts by : Tak-hung Leo Chan

Download or read book The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts written by Tak-hung Leo Chan and published by Chinese University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Fox

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Author :
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 9781861892973
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (929 download)

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Book Synopsis Fox by : Martin Wallen

Download or read book Fox written by Martin Wallen and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-12-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to fully explore the fox as the object of both derision and fascination, from the forests of North America to the deserts of Africa to the Arctic tundra.

Alien Kind

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684173825
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Alien Kind by : Rania Huntington

Download or read book Alien Kind written by Rania Huntington and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To discuss the supernatural in China is “to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts.” Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As “middle creatures,” foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.

The Cult of the Fox

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231133383
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cult of the Fox by : Xiaofei Kang

Download or read book The Cult of the Fox written by Xiaofei Kang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than five centuries the shamanistic fox cult has attracted large portions of the Chinese population and appealed to a wide range of social classes. Deemed illicit by imperial rulers and clerics and officially banned by republican and communist leaders, the fox cult has managed to survive and flourish in individual homes and community shrines throughout northern China. In this new work, the first to examine the fox cult as a vibrant popular religion, Xiaofei Kang explores the manifold meanings of the fox spirit in Chinese society. Kang describes various cult practices, activities of worship, and the exorcising of fox spirits to reveal how the Chinese people constructed their cultural and social values outside the gaze of offical power and morality.

The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231560206
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China by : Matthew H. Sommer

Download or read book The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China written by Matthew H. Sommer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years. Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.

Ghosts

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Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780235372
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis Ghosts by : Lisa Morton

Download or read book Ghosts written by Lisa Morton and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From that cheerful puff of smoke known as Casper to the hunkiest potter living or dead, Sam Wheat, there is probably no more iconic entity in supernatural history than the ghost. And these are just recent examples. From the earliest writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh to today’s ghost-hunting reality TV shows, ghosts have chilled the air of nearly every era and every culture in human history. In this book, Lisa Morton uses her scholarly prowess—more powerful than any proton pack—to wrangle together history’s most enduring ghosts into an entertaining and comprehensive look at what otherwise seems to always evade our eyes. Tracing the ghost’s constantly shifting contours, Morton asks the most direct question—What exactly is a ghost?—and examines related entities such as poltergeists, wraiths, and revenants. She asks how a ghost is related to a soul, and she outlines all the different kinds of ghosts there are. To do so, she visits the spirits of the classical world, including the five-part Egyptian soul and the first haunted-house, conceived in the Roman playwright Plautus’s comedy, Mostellaria. She confronts us with the frightening phantoms of the Middle Ages—who could incinerate priests and devour children—and reminds us of the nineteenth-century rise of Spiritualism, a religion essentially devoted to ghosts. She visits with the Indian bhuta and goes to the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, and of course she spends time in Mexico, where ghosts have a particularly strong grip on belief and culture. Along the way she gathers the ectoplasmic residues seeping from books and film reels, from the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto to the 2007 blockbuster Paranormal Activity, from the stories of Ann Radcliffe to those of Stephen King. Wide-ranging, informative, and slicked with over fifty unearthly images, Ghosts is an entertaining read of a cultural phenomenon that will delight anyone, whether they believe in ghosts or not.

The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135883912
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (358 download)

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Book Synopsis The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture by : Michael Bathgate

Download or read book The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture written by Michael Bathgate and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a millennium, the fox has been a ubiquitous figure at the margins of the Japanese collective imagination. In the writings of the nobility and the motifs of popular literature, the fox is known as a shapeshifter, able to assume various forms in order to deceive others. Focusing on recurring themes of transformation and duplicity in folklore, theology, and court and village practice, The Fox's Craft explores the meanings and uses of shapeshifter fox imagery in Japanese history. Michael Bathgate finds that the shapeshifting powers of the fox make it a surprisingly fundamental symbol in the discourse of elite and folk alike, and a key component in formulations of marriage and human identity, religious knowledge, and the power of money. The symbol of the shapeshifter fox thus provides a vantage point from which to understand the social practice of signification.

Collecting the Self

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9047414845
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (474 download)

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Book Synopsis Collecting the Self by : Sing-chen Lydia Chiang

Download or read book Collecting the Self written by Sing-chen Lydia Chiang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese strange tale collections contain short stories about ghosts and animal spirits, supra-human heroes and freaks, exotic lands and haunted homes, earthquake and floods, and other perceived “anomalies” to accepted cosmic and social norms. As such, this body of literature is a rich repository of Chinese myths, folklore, and unofficial “histories”. These collections also reflect Chinese attitudes towards normalcy and strangeness, perceptions of civilization and barbarism, and fantasies about self and other. Inspired in part by Freud’s theory of the uncanny, this book explores the emotive subtexts of late imperial strange tale collections to consider what these stories tell us about suppressed cultural anxieties, the construction of gender, and authorial self-identity.

Ainu Spirits Singing

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Author :
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824860128
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Ainu Spirits Singing by : Sarah M. Strong

Download or read book Ainu Spirits Singing written by Sarah M. Strong and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2011-10-31 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for the exceptional scope and richness of their oral performance traditions. Yet despite this cultural wealth, nothing has appeared in English on the subject in over thirty years. Sarah Strong’s Ainu Spirits Singing breaks this decades-long silence with a nuanced study and English translation of Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’yoshu, the first written transcription of Ainu oral narratives by an ethnic Ainu. The thirteen narratives in Chiri’s collection belong to the genre known as kamui yukar, said to be the most ancient performance form in the vast Ainu repertoire. In it, animals (and sometimes plants or other natural phenomena)—all regarded as spiritual beings (kamui) within the animate Ainu world—assume the role of narrator and tell stories about themselves. The first-person speakers include imposing animals such as the revered orca, the Hokkaido wolf, and Blakiston’s fish owl, as well as the more “humble” Hokkaido brown frog, snowshoe hare, and pearl mussel. Each has its own story and own signature refrain. Strong provides readers with an intimate and perceptive view of this extraordinary text. Along with critical contextual information about traditional Ainu society and its cultural assumptions, she brings forward pertinent information on the geography and natural history of the coastal southwestern Hokkaido region where the stories were originally performed. The result is a rich fusion of knowledge that allows the reader to feel at home within the animistic frame of reference of the narratives. Strong’s study also offers the first extended biography of Chiri Yukie (1903-1922) in English. The story of her life, and her untimely death at age nineteen, makes clear the harsh consequences for Chiri and her fellow Ainu of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the Meiji and Taisho governments’ policies of assimilation. Chiri’s receipt of the narratives in the Horobetsu dialect from her grandmother and aunt (both traditional performers) and the fact that no native speakers of that dialect survive today make her work all the more significant. The book concludes with a full, integral translation of the text.

Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684176077
Total Pages : 458 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture by : Margaret B. Wan

Download or read book Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture written by Margaret B. Wan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture provides a richly textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Drum ballad texts (guci) evoke one of the most popular performance traditions of their day, a practice that flourished in North China. Study of these narratives opens up surprising new perspectives on vital topics in Chinese literature and history: the creation of regional cultural identities and their relation to a central “Chinese culture”; the relationship between oral and written cultures; the transmission of legal knowledge and popular ideals of justice; and the impact of the changing technology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the reproduction and dissemination of popular texts. Margaret B. Wan maps the dissemination over time and space of two legends of wise judges; their journey through oral, written, and visual media reveals a fascinating but overlooked world of “popular” literature. While drum ballads form a distinctively regional literature, lithography in early twentieth-century Shanghai drew them into national markets. The new paradigm this book offers will interest scholars of cultural history, literature, book culture, legal history, and popular culture.

The Phantom Heroine

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 082486493X
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis The Phantom Heroine by : Judith T. Zeitlin

Download or read book The Phantom Heroine written by Judith T. Zeitlin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-06-30 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "phantom heroine"—in particular the fantasy of her resurrection through sex with a living man—is one of the most striking features of traditional Chinese literature. Even today the hypersexual female ghost continues to be a source of fascination in East Asian media, much like the sexually predatory vampire in American and European movies, TV, and novels. But while vampires can be of either gender, erotic Chinese ghosts are almost exclusively female. The significance of this gender asymmetry in Chinese literary history is the subject of Judith Zeitlin’s elegantly written and meticulously researched new book. Zeitlin’s study centers on the seventeenth century, one of the most interesting and creative periods of Chinese literature and politically one of the most traumatic, witnessing the overthrow of the Ming, the Manchu conquest, and the subsequent founding of the Qing. Drawing on fiction, drama, poetry, medical cases, and visual culture, the author departs from more traditional literary studies, which tend to focus on a single genre or author. Ranging widely across disciplines, she integrates detailed analyses of great literary works with insights drawn from the history of medicine, art history, comparative literature, anthropology, religion, and performance studies. The Phantom Heroine probes the complex literary and cultural roots of the Chinese ghost tradition. Zeitlin is the first to address its most remarkable feature: the phenomenon of verse attributed to phantom writers—that is, authors actually reputed to be spirits of the deceased. She also makes the case for the importance of lyric poetry in developing a ghostly aesthetics and image code. Most strikingly, Zeitlin shows that the representation of female ghosts, far from being a marginal preoccupation, expresses cultural concerns of central importance.

Asian Horror Encyclopedia

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Author :
Publisher : iUniverse
ISBN 13 : 0595201814
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (952 download)

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Book Synopsis Asian Horror Encyclopedia by : Laurence C. Bush

Download or read book Asian Horror Encyclopedia written by Laurence C. Bush and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Asian Horror Encyclopedia is the first reference work of its kind in English. It covers Asian horror culture in literature, art, film and comics. From its roots in ancient Chinese folklore to the best-selling Japanese horror novelists of today, this book is a handy alphabetic reference, collecting scarce information from obscure sources.

The Perturbed Self

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000431312
Total Pages : 138 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis The Perturbed Self by : Mengxing Fu

Download or read book The Perturbed Self written by Mengxing Fu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By comparison of late nineteenth-century ghost stories between China and Britain, this monograph traces the entangled dynamics between ghost story writing, history-making, and the moulding of a gendered self. Associated with times of anxiety, groups under marginalisation, and tensions with orthodox narratives, ghost stories from two distinguished literary traditions are explored through the writings and lives of four innovative writers of this period, namely Xuan Ding (宣鼎) and Wang Tao (王韬) in China and Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit in Britain. Through this cross-cultural investigation, the book illuminates how a gendered self is constructed in each culture and what cultural baggage and assets are brought into this construction. It also ventures to sketch a common poetics underlying a "literature of the anomaly" that can be both destabilising and constructive, subversive, and coercive. This book will be welcomed by the Gothic studies community, as well as scholars working in the fields of women’s writing, nineteenth-century British literature, and Chinese literature.

Juridification in Bioethics

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Author :
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 1911299646
Total Pages : 504 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (112 download)

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Book Synopsis Juridification in Bioethics by : Calvin Wai-Loon Ho

Download or read book Juridification in Bioethics written by Calvin Wai-Loon Ho and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is 'legal' about bioethics? What are the ideas and artefacts that bioethics encompasses, and how are they related to law? What is the role of law in bioethics? In this work, Calvin Ho attempts to address these questions in the context of the governance of human pluripotent stem cell research. In essence, he argues that the hybridization of law, through processes, devices and techniques of juridification, has helped to constitute bioethics as a public sphere and an emergent civic epistemology. Drawing on his multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and on Actor-Network-Theory, Ho explains how the law has, through bioethics, contributed to the scientific and public understanding of human pluripotent stem cell research and its artefacts, particularly the embryo and human-animal combinations. Although the focus of his work is on bioethical developments in Singapore over a period of more than 15 years, parallel developments in key jurisdictions (especially the United States of America and the United Kingdom) and in international science policy are also evaluated. It is through appreciating how it has progressed that bioethics will be better able to engage with future challenges presented by advances in human embryo research and gene editing techniques, among others.

Boggarts, Trolls and Tylwyth Teg

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Author :
Publisher : The History Press
ISBN 13 : 0750998334
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (59 download)

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Book Synopsis Boggarts, Trolls and Tylwyth Teg by : Peter Stevenson

Download or read book Boggarts, Trolls and Tylwyth Teg written by Peter Stevenson and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Grimms called them The Quiet Folk, in Māori they are Patupaiarehe, in Wales Y Tylwyth Teg : hidden people who live unseen, speak their own languages and move around like migrants, shrouded from our eyes – like those who lived in the utopian world of Plant Rhys Ddwfn off the west Welsh coast, where this book begins. In mythology, lost lands are coral castles beneath the sea, ancient forests where spirits live, and mountain swamps where trolls lurk. Strip away the mythology, and they become valleys and villages flooded to provide drinking water to neighbouring kingdoms, campsites where travellers are told they can't travel, and reservations where the rights of first nations people are ignored. The folk tales in this book tell of these lost lands and hidden people, remembered through migrations, dreams and memories.

Koro

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030879623
Total Pages : 540 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis Koro by : Arabinda Narayan Chowdhury

Download or read book Koro written by Arabinda Narayan Chowdhury and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a definitive account of koro, a topic of long-standing interest in the field of cultural psychiatry in which the patient displays a fear of the genitals shrinking and retracting. Written by Professor A.N. Chowdhury, a leading expert in the field, it provides a comprehensive overview of the cultural, historical and clinical significance of the condition that includes both cutting-edge critique and an analysis of research and accounts from the previous 120 years published literature. The book begins by outlining the definition, etymology of the term, and clinical features of koro as a culture-bound syndrome, and contextualizes the concept with reference to its historical origins and local experience in Southeast Asia, and its subsequent widespread occurrence in South Asia. It also critically examines the concept of culture-bound disorder and the development of the terminology, such as cultural concepts of distress, which is the term that is currently used in the DSM-5. Subsequent chapters elaborate the cultural context of koro in Chinese and South Asian cultures, including cultural symbolic analysis of associations with animals (fox and turtle) and phallic imagery based on troubling self-perceived aspects of body image that is central to the concept. The second section of the book offers a comprehensive, global literature review, before addressing the current status and relevance of koro, clinically relevant questions of risk assessment and forensic issues, and research methodology. This landmark work will provide a unique resource for clinicians and researchers working in cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, anthropology, medical sociology, social work and psychosexual medicine.

Making the New World Their Own

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004284389
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Making the New World Their Own by : Qiong Zhang

Download or read book Making the New World Their Own written by Qiong Zhang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making the New World Their Own offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with the Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century.