Leisure and Chinese Culture: A Symposium

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Notes

1 Chris Rojek, Leisure and Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

2 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991); Sebastian De Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962); Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, The Social Psychology of Leisure and Recreation (Dubuque: William C. Brown Publishers, 1980); John Neulinger, The Psychology of Leisure: Research Approaches to the Study of Leisure (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1974).

3 This is the assessment of Anthony J. Veal in his “Leisure, Culture, and Lifestyle,” Loisir et Société/Society and Leisure 24:2 (Autumn 2001), 359–76.

4 See, for example, Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai and Hai Ren, eds., Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

5 Charles A. Laughlin, The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), 1–2.

6 Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: The John Day Company, 1937), 148–51 (also discussed in James Hargett's article).

7 Lin shows how serious he is in a kind of manifesto inspired by a similar essay with the same title by Yuan Zongdao (1560–1600): Lin Yutang, “Lun wen: shang xia” 論文上下 (On writing, Parts I and II), in Dahuang ji 大荒集 (The wasteland, Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1985), 197–206.

8 Quoted in Wu-chi Liu, Introduction to Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 216.

9 Jin's edition of the Shuihu zhuan was published in 1641. T. K. C. Trans., “Preface to ‘Suihu’,” The China Critic March 7, 1935, 234–35.

10 Cao Xueqin, Story of the Stone: The Golden Days –Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 3–4.

11 Jack W. Chen has recently examined the Shishuo xinyu from the point of view of gossip (itself an important leisure activity, as Cong Ellen Zhang's article shows) and its role in maintaining and learning about social networks in his “Knowing Men and Being Known: Gossip and Social Networks in the Shishuo xinyu,” in Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg, eds., Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 55–70. He also applies data analysis to the mapping of social networks in the Shishuo xinyu in “The Shishuo xinyu as Data Visualization,” Co-authored with Zoe Borovsky, Yoh Kawano, and Ryan Chen, Early Medieval China 20 (2014): 22–58, a methodology that could be expanded both to biji and diaries. For Shishuo xinyu as the fountainhead of anecdotal compilations, see Nanxiu Qian. Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-Shuo Hsin-Yü and Its Legacy (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001).

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Notes on contributors

Charles A. Laughlin

Charles A. Laughlin is Ellen Bayard Weedon Chair Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. He has published extensively on Chinese literature from the 1920s to 1960s, including two books: Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Duke, 2002) and The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Hawai'i, 2008). Laughlin also edited Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature (Palgrave, 2005). His current research is on the engagement with desire from Chinese revolutionary literature to the literature and film of socialism.