Cantonese Love Songs


Book Description

This collection of 97 Cantonese love songs aims to give a wider audience the opportunity of reading these songs in English. The author investigates the language and social background of the songs and provides cross-references to Chinese and Western literature.The Chinese text of the poems is also included.




Cantonese Love-songs


Book Description




Cantonese as Written Language


Book Description

Cantonese is the only dialect of Chinese which has developed a widely known and used written form. It has played a role in publishing in the Guangdong region since the late Ming dynasty when various types of verses using Cantonese were published as mu yu shu (‘wooden fish books’). In the early twentieth century these dialect texts were joined by Cantonese opera scripts, published as popular reading material. However, it was only after the end of the Second World War that written Cantonese came to be widely used in popular newspapers and magazines, advertising, and in the private communications. Cantonese as Written Language examines this development in the broader context of diglossia, and also of the patterns by which spoken vernaculars have developed written forms in other societies. Based on primary source research, including interviews with publishers and writers who played an important role in the growth of written Cantonese, the author argues that this move of Cantonese into the realm of written language is closely associated with Hong Kong's distinct local culture and identity. The growth of the written vernacular also reflects the territory's evolving cultural distinctiveness from mainland China, first as a British colony, and now as a Special Administrative Region of China.




Cantonese Love-Songs;


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.




Cantonese Love Stories


Book Description

A collection of twenty-five narrative sketches, Cantonese Love Stories offers an intimate look into the cultural, commercial and romantic milieu of Hong Kong in the 1990s. Two lovers ruminate on the power of their photo booth stickers to keep them together. Peach-pocket Girl reads stolen love letters at a café. Pui Pui knows a Portuguese egg tart is authentic if she dreams of riding a boat-like egg tart. Each character inhabits a different corner of Hong Kong’s dreamscape; together they bring to life Dung Kai-cheung’s imaginative vision of the city.




Hong Kong Cantopop


Book Description

Cantopop was once the leading pop genre of pan-Chinese popular music around the world. In this pioneering study of Cantopop in English, Yiu-Wai Chu shows how the rise of Cantopop is related to the emergence of a Hong Kong identity and consciousness. Chu charts the fortune of this important genre of twentieth-century Chinese music from its humble, lower-class origins in the 1950s to its rise to a multimillion-dollar business in the mid-1990s. As the voice of Hong Kong, Cantopop has given generations of people born in the city a sense of belonging. It was only in the late 1990s, when transformations in the music industry, and more importantly, changes in the geopolitical situation of Hong Kong, that Cantopop showed signs of decline. As such, Hong Kong Cantopop: A Concise History is not only a brief history of Cantonese pop songs, but also of Hong Kong culture. The book concludes with a chapter on the eclipse of Cantopop by Mandapop (Mandarin popular music), and an analysis of the relevance of Cantopop to Hong Kong people in the age of a dominant China. Drawing extensively from Chinese-language sources, this work is a most informative introduction to Hong Kong popular music studies. “Few scholars I know of have as thorough a knowledge of Cantopop as Yiu-Wai Chu. The account he provides here—of pop music as a nexus of creative talent, commoditized culture, and geopolitical change—is not only a story about postwar Hong Kong; it is also a resource for understanding the term ‘localism’ in the era of globalization.” —Rey Chow, Duke University “Yiu-Wai Chu’s book presents a remarkable accomplishment: it is not only the first history of Cantopop published in English; it also manages to interweave the sound of Cantopop with the geopolitical changes taking place in East Asia. Combining a lucid theoretical approach with rich empirical insights, this book will be a milestone in the study of East Asian popular cultures.” —Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam




The Periodical


Book Description




Chinese Music in Print


Book Description

Grounded in a desire to bring back to life rare items from the University of Hong Kong’s Fung Ping Shan Library that are entwined within the world of music and to place them in a context of books and images in American, British, and other Asian collections, Chinese Music in Print views the library as a repository not of information but of artifact, and then uses these artifacts as a means for generating scholarly narrative. It begins by assessing seminal texts in the Confucian canon set against the delicacy of the concubine and amanuensis Shen Cai’s calligraphy and poetry. Confucianism was itself a crucial aspect of courtly life, and an exploration of its ritual is the book’s second theme. Vernacular genres of opera and song are represented in the third chapter, while the Great Sage returns in the fourth for an exploration of the repertoire and richness of his favourite instrument, the qin. The final chapter ends the journey with discussion of the legacy of generations of Europeans who have visited China and their contribution to the understanding of a more vernacular instrument, the erhu. “Like the 2021 exhibition called ‘Music in Print’ that preceded it, this exploration of Chinese music history introduces many rare books from the University of Hong Kong Libraries. The essays combine professional expertise in musicology with an excellent grasp of traditional bibliography, which allows the one to illuminate the other. Bravo!” —J. S. Edgren, Princeton University “I am most impressed by the critical reading of the author who excels in classical studies, whose expertise in calligraphy, seals, editions, and other related disciplines in Sinology is admirable. His meticulous investigation into the complicated situation regarding the book printing business of dynastic China is professional and convincing.” —Yu Siu-wah, chief editor of Anthology of Chinese Folk and Ethnic Instrumental Music: The Hong Kong Volume “Such a wide-ranging but meticulously researched book that now contextualizes the dissemination and transmission of music into the discussion of manuscript and printed culture in China will clearly be an important addition to the holdings of libraries supporting Chinese studies and book studies broadly taken, as well as those supporting the study of music. Obviously, it will be of direct importance for specialists in East Asian book studies and for musicologists of East Asian traditions.” —Elizabeth Markham, University of Arkansas “This beautifully illustrated and carefully edited book is the first English-language monograph dedicated exclusively to the history of Chinese music as captured through the medium of print. It introduces a host of new sources and methodologies to the English-speaking public, fruitfully complicates established narratives of music history and of print cultures in both East and West, and offers a vital building-block for the creation of a truly global music history.” —Karl Kügle, University of Oxford




Chinese Love Songs


Book Description




Multimedia Stardom in Hong Kong


Book Description

This book details original research into the practices and discourse of multimedia stardom alongside changing social and cultural landscapes in Hong Kong since 1980. It examines the cultural and sociological significance of stardom in the region, and the conditions which gave rise to such famous stars as Jackie Chan. This book elaborates the distinction between multimedia stardom and celebrity, asserting that in Hong Kong stardom has been central in the production and consumption of local media, while demonstrating the importance of multimedia stardom as part of the ‘cultural Chinese’ mediascape and transnational popular culture from both historical and contemporary contexts.