{"title":"Keith Mcmahon","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"celestial-women-book-keith-mcmahon-9781538141434","title":"Celestial Women","description":"This volume completes Keith McMahon's acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor's plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor's relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women's participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor's relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China's transformation into a republic.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738713170193,"sku":"NGR9781538141434","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51688014807313,"sku":"NIN9781538141434","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52587173249297,"sku":"NLS9781538141434","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1538141434.jpg?v=1759401761"},{"product_id":"women-shall-not-rule-book-keith-mcmahon-9781538141946","title":"Women Shall Not Rule","description":"Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. Women Shall Not Rule offers a fascinating history of imperial wives and concubines, especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous harmony—rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in politics. Besides ambitious empresses and concubines, these vivid stories of the imperial polygamous family are also populated with prolific emperors, wanton women, libertine men, cunning eunuchs, and bizarre cases of intrigue and scandal among rival wives.   Keith McMahon, a leading expert on the history of gender in China, draws upon decades of research to describe the values and ideals of imperial polygamy and the ways in which it worked and did not work in real life. His rich sources are both historical and fictional, including poetic accounts and sensational stories told in pornographic detail. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic life of royal palaces across the world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50387834339601,"sku":"CIN1538141949VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51504086778129,"sku":"NIN9781538141946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51630589706513,"sku":"NGR9781538141946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52532677607697,"sku":"NLS9781538141946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1538141949.jpg?v=1759400170"},{"product_id":"fall-of-the-god-of-money-book-keith-mcmahon-9780742518032","title":"The Fall of the God of Money","description":"In this first truly cross-cultural study of opium, Keith McMahon considers the perspectives of both smokers and non-smokers from China and the Euro-West and from both sides of the issue of opium prohibition. The author stages a dramatic confrontation between the Chinese opium user and the Euro-Westerner who saw in opium the image of an uncanny Asiatic menace. Opium was inextricably bound up with generalizations made about teeming Asiatic masses, nightmarish opium sots, effeminate Chinamen, and orientalized white women. In China, opium--called the Western Drug--was tied to the arrival of Christianity and Western greed. The rise of the opium demon meant the fall of the god of money, that is, Chinese money, and the irreversible trend in which Confucianism gave way to Christianity. McMahon makes the case for opium smoking as a way of life that, far from being merely wanton, was an entirely reasonable choice in times when smokers could be neither Christian nor Confucian. Opium smoking was a way of inhabiting an era in which traditional loyalties were in critical transition. The author convincingly demonstrates that the current laws against drugs of addiction have their origins in this early modern conflict of cultures and not in any supposed scientific evidence that opium is so definitively worse than alcohol. The book explores early Western observations of opium smoking, the formation of arguments for and against the legalization of opium, the portrayals of opium smoking in Chinese poetry and prose, and scenes of opium-smoking interactions among male and female smokers and smokers of all social levels in 19th-century China. By providing the first translation ever of a unique 1878 autobiography of a Chinese addict, McMahon is able to explore the opium smoker's own observations on China and opium smoking. No other studies have focused attention so richly on opium smokers, their language, the scenes of their smoking together, their gendered interactions, and their relations with family and society.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51694894448913,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51694895923473,"sku":"CIN0742518035G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0742518035.jpg?v=1750817181"},{"product_id":"women-shall-not-rule-book-keith-mcmahon-9781442222892","title":"Women Shall Not Rule","description":"Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. 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Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic life of royal palaces across the world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52333067206929,"sku":"NLS9781442222892","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53014685024529,"sku":"NIN9781442222892","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53625282920721,"sku":"GOR014986371","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781442222892.jpg?v=1758153590"},{"product_id":"misers-shrews-and-polygamists-book-keith-mcmahon-9780822315551","title":"Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists","description":"Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China. In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the \"miser\" and the \"shrew\"-caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman?  The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52856512676113,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52856512807185,"sku":"NIN9780822315551","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780822315551.jpg?v=1765028111"},{"product_id":"misers-shrews-and-polygamists-book-keith-mcmahon-9780822315667","title":"Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists","description":"Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, this title examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52858339688721,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52858339754257,"sku":"NIN9780822315667","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780822315667.jpg?v=1765117468"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-keith-mcmahon.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}