Mirror, Death, and Rhetoric: Reading Later Han Chinese Bronze Artifacts

• Autores: Eugene Yuejin Wang
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 76, Nº 3, 1994, págs. 511-534
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The paper starts by exploring the relationship between the millennia-old mirror metaphor and actual bronze mirrors. Early Chinese mirrors typically feature motif, involving the search for immortality with few moral overtones. The mirrors under study here, however, represent history by featuring a graphic suicide. Matching political circumstances, period terms, rhapsodic structures, and social practices with iconography, stylistic properties, and compositional structure in the mirrors' design, this paper reconstructs the rhetorical context underlying these mirrors, and demonstrates that the polysemy behind figurative decoration can be illuminated by the contemporary discursive pattern.