| Popis: |
The countries of East Asia shared several different print technologies before the introduction of mechanized printing in the nineteenth century: xylography and wooden moveable type, inventions of the Chinese, in the seventh and fourteenth centuries respectively; and metal moveable type, developed by the Korean state in the thirteenth century. China first developed a full-fledged book culture, supplied, over the course of the ninth and thirteenth centuries, with publications from religious (primarily Buddhist) institutions, the imperial state, individual literati, and commercial houses. Trade and diplomatic relations between China, Korea, and Japan—and the fact that Chinese was the written lingua franca of East Asia—eased the transmission of technologies and texts from China to Korea and Japan and back. Cultures associated with and resulting from printing, however, took different forms in each country. In China, an aesthetic ‘golden age’ of high-end publishing in the late medieval period gradually gave way, in the early modern period, to the rise of commercial publishing and (not coincidentally) a rapid expansion in the reading public. The result was an explosion in the production of popular texts, designed for a broad audience even if aesthetic quality was sacrificed. In Korea, the state maintained control over publishing, and approved texts in metal type were sent to outlying provinces for xylographic reproduction and controlled distribution to local elites. Japan, after a half-century experimentation with moveable type, re-embraced xylography in the late sixteenth century, and, like China, enjoyed an exuberant commercial publishing boom that both signalled and stimulated expansion in the reading audience. |
