Looking into animals and plants from the perspective of visual culture studies; Critical reevaluation of the interaction between text and image in shaping notions of animals and plants; Foregrounding the transformation of ideas in the early modern period, especially vernacularization of knowledge The seven articles in this edited volume address the complex meanings that visual representations of plants and animals gained in early modern China and Japan. They aim to understand animals and plants in the new contexts of empirical and epistemological concerns, political and social agendas, and cultural interests. In particular, they examine the ways in which scholars, professional painters, and publishers engendered the sociohistorical meanings of the images.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Singing Frogs: Approaches to Registering Animals in The Nihon
Sankai Meisan zue Doreen Mueller
Chapter 2: Tea Harvesting at Uji: Repackaging Uji as a Productive Place
Shiori Hiraki
Chapter 3: Disciplined Objects?: Wood panels from the Kew Collections Maki
Fukuoka
Chapter 4: The Return of the Elephants: A Social History of Elephant Watching
in Early Modern China Fan Lin
Chapter 5: A Pair of Camels in Edo Japan: Representation and Discourse
Hiroyuki Suzuki
Chapter 6: Pictures of Sea Fish (Haiyu tu) and Knowledge of Nature in
Eighteenth-Century China Ching-Ling Wang
Chapter 7: Treatise (pu) versus Illustration (tu) Absence and Presence of
Illustrations in Pulu Writings on Chinese Nature Studies Martina Siebert
Fan Lin is an art historian at the Institute of Area Studies at Leiden University. Her research interests focus on mapmaking and urban culture in middle period China, especially during the Song period. Doreen Mueller is assistant professor of Japanese art and material culture at Leiden University. Her research explores the intersections of visual culture, social and environmental history with a focus on representations of famine and natural disasters.
