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Historians have claimed that when social stability returned to Korea after a series of devastating invasions by the Japanese and Manchus around the turn of the seventeenth century, the late Chos n dynasty was a period of unprecedented economic and cultural renaissance. This book questions this age-old belief by claiming that true-view landscape and genre�paintings were most likely�adopted to propagandize�social harmony under Chos n rule and to justify the status, wealth,�and land grabs of the ruling class.�This volume also documents the popularity and misunderstanding of art books from China and, most controversially, Korean enthusiasm for artistic programs from Edo Japan, thus challenging academic stereotypes and nationalistic tendencies in scholarship. As the first truly interdisciplinary study of Korean art, A New Middle Kingdom illuminates the reality of the late Chos n society that its visual art attempted hide.

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Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing on Zhou's work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.

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