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Book Review
Asia
Norman Kutcher. Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State. (Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 210. $64.95.
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Norman Kutcher has written an engaging and provocative book about personal and political aspects of mourning in seventeenth and eighteenth-century China. It is engaging because it makes imaginative use of the expressions of loss and grief that accompanied the rise of ritualism. It is provocative because it demands that we take such personal expressions seriously as data in the increasingly complex discussion of ritual, scholarship, and politics in this period. With his extensive use of imperial archives as well as published literary and administrative documents, Kutcher forces us not only to consider the emotional crises of individuals who survived the widespread death and destruction of civil war and conquest but also to analyze the boundaries of "acceptable discourse" about death and mourning that unfolded during the decades surrounding these events. |
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