• ISBN13: 9789004160262
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: N/A
• Publisher: Brill
• Publisher Imprint: Brill
• Publication Date: March 26, 2007
• Pages: 194
• Original Price: USD 140.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 277 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): Europe / General

This is the first interdisciplinary effort to study friendship in late imperial China from the perspective of gender history. Friendship was valorized with unprecedented enthusiasm in Ming China (1368-1644). Some Ming literati even proposed that friendship was the most fundamental relationship among the so-called "five cardinal human relationships".
Why the cult of friendship in Ming China? How was male friendship theorized, practiced and represented during that period? These are some of the questions the current volume deals with. Coming from different disciplines (history, musicology and literary studies), the contributors thoroughly explore the complexities and the gendered nature of friendship in Ming China.
This volume has also been published as a special theme issue of Brill's journal NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in China.

Martin W. Huang, Ph.D. (1991) in Chinese and Comparative Literature, Washington University, St. Louis, is Professor of Chinese at University of California, Irvine. Among his recent publications are Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2001) and Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China (Hawai'i, 2006).