The Death Of Woman Wang
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the remote county of T'an-ch'eng in seventeenth-century China, a peasant woman named Wang vanishes into the night, setting in motion a haunting tale of rural life, poverty, and brutal justice that cuts to the very marrow of imperial China. Jonathan D. Spence's The Death of Woman Wang reconstructs this forgotten world through the meticulous use of local gazetteers, court records, and the vivid literary sketches of Pu Songling, painting a portrait of a society crushed beneath the weight of natural disaster, banditry, and an indifferent bureaucracy. Spence, one of the twentieth century's most celebrated historians of China, argues that the stories of ordinary, voiceless people are as revealing as those of emperors and dynasties — and his prose carries the conviction of that belief on every page. The narrative moves with the quiet intensity of a classical Chinese painting, layering historical fact with an almost novelistic intimacy to illuminate themes of gender, survival, and the precariousness of human life on the margins of power. A masterwork of historical reconstruction, it leaves the reader to ponder what countless other stories have been forever swallowed by silence.
Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Format: Paperback
Genre: Asian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the remote county of T'an-ch'eng in seventeenth-century China, a peasant woman named Wang vanishes into the night, setting in motion a haunting tale of rural life, poverty, and brutal justice that cuts to the very marrow of imperial China. Jonathan D. Spence's The Death of Woman Wang reconstructs this forgotten world through the meticulous use of local gazetteers, court records, and the vivid literary sketches of Pu Songling, painting a portrait of a society crushed beneath the weight of natural disaster, banditry, and an indifferent bureaucracy. Spence, one of the twentieth century's most celebrated historians of China, argues that the stories of ordinary, voiceless people are as revealing as those of emperors and dynasties — and his prose carries the conviction of that belief on every page. The narrative moves with the quiet intensity of a classical Chinese painting, layering historical fact with an almost novelistic intimacy to illuminate themes of gender, survival, and the precariousness of human life on the margins of power. A masterwork of historical reconstruction, it leaves the reader to ponder what countless other stories have been forever swallowed by silence.