Date/Time
Date(s) - 12 Oct 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Monday, October 12, the Workshop in the History of Material Texts will convene at 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
The Workshop welcomes Cynthia Brokaw (Brown University) for a talk entitled “‘Delightful to the Senses’: Color Woodblock Printing in Early Modern China.”
Cynthia writes:
Although evidence of woodblock color printing survives from as early as the fourteenth century in China, the golden age of color printing came three centuries later, with the publishing boom of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This talk first describes the development of the technology of color printing and the uses of color in print in that period, when the most exquisite examples of the art/craft were produced by literati/craftsmen for the enjoyment of a wealthy, highly cultivated elite audience. I then trace the later history of woodblock color printing through its expansion and decline. By the eighteenth century, the audience for stand-alone colored prints had expanded to include a growing “middle class” of merchants and urban dwellers interested in pictures that celebrated their prosperity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a much broader and lower-status audience of peasants, petty tradesmen, rural craftsmen, and agricultural laborers stimulated a broad and geographically expanded market for ever cheaper and more poorly manufactured prints.
*Cynthia Brokaw, professor of history at Brown University, specializes in Chinese book history of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Her most recent monograph, *Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods *(2007) focuses on the production and distribution of cheap imprints among the rural population of south China and the role that expansion of the book trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stimulated cultural integration. She has co-edited two essay collections on Chinese print culture: *Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China* (2005), with Kai-wing Chow; and *From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Book Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008*(2010), with Christopher Reed. *
All are welcome! Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the library building.