Author Description

"The Palace of Eternal Joy (Yongle gong) is a mammoth cult site dedicated to late imperial China's most popular deity, Lu Dongbin. Paul Katz focuses on the Palace's role in the development of Lu's legend. This approach takes into account the various "histories" of the Palace presented in different texts and surpasses previous scholarship by stressing the ways in which the site both reflected and produced cultural diversity. Katz breaks new ground by analyzing the texts in terms of the textuality - the process by which they were produced, transmitted, and understood."--BOOK JACKET.