Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West

The Age of Silver advances a horizontal method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of
economic globalization the Age of Silver, Ning Ma emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial co-evolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic
realisms. The main texts addressed within include The Plum in the Golden Vase (China), Don Quixote (Spain), The Life of an Amorous Man (Japan), and Robinson Crusoe (England). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansions' stimulation
of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with politically critical functions and connote heteroglossic national imaginaries. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes
commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. The Age of Silver challenges the unilateral equation between globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of world literature and
historical transcultural relations.


Author: Ning Ma
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/22/2016
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.30w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780190606565

About the Author

Ning Ma is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Tufts University.