Heaven Above, Suzhou and Hangzhou Below: Urban Culture in Early Modern China

The commercial boom of sixteenth and seventeenth century China stimulated the growth of a lively popular culture in the great cities of the southeast—Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. These cities became magnets for ambitious scholars, pleasure-loving merchants, courtesans, artists, and writers and sites for the production of some of the great masterpieces of Chinese vernacular fiction, drama, book art, and painting. After some background reading in socioeconomic history, the course focuses on analysis of the literature and art of the period and what it reveals about the short-lived “floating world” of late imperial China. P