Awards

• Winner of Raymond Klibansky Prize, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Science 2006 (Canada)

Overview

This interdisciplinary study brings history and art together in a definitive discussion of the Chinese woodblock print form of nianhua (literally ""New Year pictures""), and an extraordinary account of the cultural life of rural North China during the late 19th to mid-20th century. Beginning with an overview of nianhua production, the study makes the critical point that rural China was embedded in a highly developed print culture. Through an analysis of the role of nianhua first in the home, and later in commercial and political theatres, Flath considers the relationship of the prints to the social, cultural, and political milieu of North China from the late-Qing dynasty to the early 1950s. Using nianhua as historical documents, he offers an original reconstruction of popular conceptions of domesticity, morality, gender, society, and modernity. He concludes with an examination of how communist authorities conscripted and transformed the nianhua genre for use as a propaganda tool in the 1940s and early 1950s. The Cult of Happiness is among the first studies in any field to treat folk art and folk print as historical text. As such, this richly illustrated volume will appeal to a wide range of scholars in Asian studies, history, art history, folklore and print, as well as anyone having a passion for the creativity and culture of rural society.

Full Product Details

9780774810340

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Reviews

There can be no doubt that this short book, densely packed with new information and well illustrated in colour as well as black and white, is an original contribution to the well-worked field of Late Imperial-Republican era Chinese history. James A. Flath brings to the history new material and a seriously interdisciplinary approach, one which draws on anthropology, folklore studies, and politics, as well as combing history with art history. -- Ralph Croizier * University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, Winter 2006 * This is a significant new book on the traditional New Year print (nianhua) in Norht China nad its modern transformations. Flath's book is based on a particularly thorough investigation of early (mostly nineteenth and early twentieth-century) European sources on popular prints. -- David Holm, The University of Melbourne * The China Journal 55 * This engagingly written and rigorously argued book on the nianhua, literally New Year Pictures, produced in Shandong, Hebei, and Henan Provinces from about 1880 to 1950, is a welcome and important contribution to the study of China's visual culture ... The author's principal disciplinary identification is as a historian, and it is as historical texts that he engages with the seventy-four nianhua reproduced here (forty-three of them in good-quality color). However, his diligence in searching them out in collections in China and Europe, and the scrupulous attention paid to them also as material objects in their own right, with histories of production, distribution, and consumption practices all given their due weight is moreover a model of practice to art historians interested in addressing this material... The choice of cover illustration, a print from 1950 by Li Qi titled Looking over the Tracktor, might lead the unwary to expect more discussion of the post-Liberation transformations of nianhua than the book provides. However, it is clear that James Flath is highly qualified to provide this discussion, and it is very much to be hoped that he continues to do so to the same high standard as he sets here. -- Craig Clunas, Professor of Chinese and East Asian Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, China * Review International, Vol. 12, No.1, Spring 2005 *

This is a significant new book on the traditional New Year print (nianhua) in Norht China nad its modern transformations. Flath's book is based on a particularly thorough investigation of early (mostly nineteenth and early twentieth-century) European sources on popular prints. -- David Holm, The University of Melbourne The China Journal 55 There can be no doubt that this short book, densely packed with new information and well illustrated in colour as well as black and white, is an original contribution to the well-worked field of Late Imperial-Republican era Chinese history. James A. Flath brings to the history new material and a seriously interdisciplinary approach, one which draws on anthropology, folklore studies, and politics, as well as combing history with art history. -- Ralph Croizier University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, Winter 2006 This engagingly written and rigorously argued book on the nianhua, literally New Year Pictures, produced in Shandong, Hebei, and Henan Provinces from about 1880 to 1950, is a welcome and important contribution to the study of China's visual culture ... The author's principal disciplinary identification is as a historian, and it is as historical texts that he engages with the seventy-four nianhua reproduced here (forty-three of them in good-quality color). However, his diligence in searching them out in collections in China and Europe, and the scrupulous attention paid to them also as material objects in their own right, with histories of production, distribution, and consumption practices all given their due weight is moreover a model of practice to art historians interested in addressing this material... The choice of cover illustration, a print from 1950 by Li Qi titled Looking over the Tracktor, might lead the unwary to expect more discussion of the post-Liberation transformations of nianhua than the book provides. However, it is clear that James Flath is highly qualified to provide this discussion, and it is very much to be hoped that he continues to do so to the same high standard as he sets here. -- Craig Clunas, Professor of Chinese and East Asian Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, China Review International, Vol. 12, No.1, Spring 2005

Author Information

James A. Flath teaches in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario.

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