Download or read book Li Zhi Confucianism and the Virtue of Desire written by Pauline C. Lee and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a bestselling author with a devoted readership. His biting, shrewd, and visionary writings with titles like A Book to Hide and A Book to Burn were both inspiring and inflammatory. Widely read from his own time to the present, Li Zhi has long been acknowledged as an important figure in Chinese cultural history. While he is esteemed as a stinging social critic and an impassioned writer, Li Zhi's ideas have been dismissed as lacking a deeper or constructive vision. Pauline C. Lee convincingly shows us otherwise. Situating Li Zhi within the highly charged world of the late-Ming culture of "feelings," Lee presents his slippery and unruly yet clear and robust ethical vision. Li Zhi is a Confucian thinker whose consuming concern is a powerful interior world of abundance, distinctive to each individual: the realm of the emotions. Critical to his ideal of the good life is the ability to express one's feelings well. In the work's conclusion, Lee brings Li Zhi's insights into conversation with contemporary philosophical debates about the role of feelings, an ethics of authenticity, and the virtue of desire.

Download or read book Symptoms of an Unruly Age written by Rivi Handler-Spitz and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Symptoms of an Unruly Age compares the writings of Li Zhi (1527–1602) and his late-Ming compatriots to texts composed by their European contemporaries, including Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Emphasizing aesthetic patterns that transcend national boundaries, Rivi Handler-Spitz explores these works as culturally distinct responses to similar social and economic tensions affecting early modern cultures on both ends of Eurasia. The paradoxes, ironies, and self-contradictions that pervade these works are symptomatic of the hypocrisy, social posturing, and counterfeiting that afflicted both Chinese and European societies at the turn of the seventeenth century. Symptoms of an Unruly Age shows us that these texts, produced thousands of miles away from one another, each constitute cultural manifestations of early modernity.

Download or read book Li Zhi Confucianism and the Virtue of Desire written by Pauline C. Lee and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a bestselling author with a devoted readership. His biting, shrewd, and visionary writings with titles like A Book to Hide and A Book to Burn were both inspiring and inflammatory. Widely read from his own time to the present, Li Zhi has long been acknowledged as an important figure in Chinese cultural history. While he is esteemed as a stinging social critic and an impassioned writer, Li Zhi’s ideas have been dismissed as lacking a deeper or constructive vision. Pauline C. Lee convincingly shows us otherwise. Situating Li Zhi within the highly charged world of the late-Ming culture of “feelings,” Lee presents his slippery and unruly yet clear and robust ethical vision. Li Zhi is a Confucian thinker whose consuming concern is a powerful interior world of abundance, distinctive to each individual: the realm of the emotions. Critical to his ideal of the good life is the ability to express one’s feelings well. In the work’s conclusion, Lee brings Li Zhi’s insights into conversation with contemporary philosophical debates about the role of feelings, an ethics of authenticity, and the virtue of desire.

Download or read book A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep hidden written by Zhi Li and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Li Zhi's interpretations of history, religion, literature, and social relations synthesized Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ethics and incorporated the Neo-Confucian idealism of such thinkers as Wang Yangming. The result was a series of heretical writings that caught fire among Li Zhi's contemporaries. Fond of vivid sentiment and sharp expression, Li Zhi refused to support sanctioned ideas about morality and wrote stinging critiques. In this sophisticated translation, English-speaking readers encounter the best of this intellectual's contribution to Chinese thought. -- Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Alfonso Vagnone s Tongyou Jiaoyu On the Education of Children c 1632 written by Giulia Falato and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giulia Falato’s work on Alfonso Vagnone S.J.’ s (1568-1640) Tongyou jiaoyu 童幼教育 (On the Education of Children) offers a systematic study of the earliest treatise on European pedagogy and its first annotated translation in English. In particular, it highlights the role of Tongyou jiaoyu as a cultural bridge between the Chinese and Western traditions. Drawing from archival materials and multi-language literature, Falato produces an insightful account of the Jesuit’s background, the pedagogical debate in late-Ming China, and the making and main sources of the treatise. Through the diachronic analysis of a selection of philosophical terms, this work also provides a fresh perspective on the Jesuits’ lexical innovations and contribution to the formation of the modern Chinese lexicon.

Download or read book Reading for the Moral written by Maria Franca Sibau and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.

Download or read book Daoism and Anarchism written by John A. Rapp and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-08-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in the Contemporary Anarchist Studies examines anarchist themes in ancient and modern Chinese dissident political thought.

Download or read book Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China written by Benjamin A. Elman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During China's late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), men gathered by the millions every two or three years outside official examination compounds sprinkled across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy. Civil Examinations assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in fostering the world's first professional class based on demonstrated knowledge and skill. Civil examinations were instituted in China in the seventh century CE, but in the Ming and Qing eras they were at the center of a complex social web that held together the intellectual, political, and economic life of imperial China. Local elites and the court sought to influence how the government regulated the classical curriculum and selected civil officials. As a guarantor of educational merit, examinations tied the dynasty to the privileged gentry and literati classes--both ideologically and institutionally. China eliminated its classical examination system in 1905. But this carefully balanced, constantly contested piece of social engineering, worked out over centuries, was an early harbinger of the meritocratic regime of college boards and other entrance exams that undergirds higher education in much of the world today.

Download or read book The Ming Maritime Trade Policy in Transition 1368 to 1567 written by Kangying Li and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2010 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ming maritime policy in transition, 1368-1567" is an unprecedented structural approach to one of the most puzzling phenomena in Chinese early modern history: the maritime trade prohibition from 1368 to 1567. This policy deliberately interdicted its own people from sailing abroad and prevented foreigners from entering China unless they were part of an official tribute mission. Other than treating this phenomenon as an isolated trade policy or defense strategy the author analyzes the policy against the general Chinese historical background from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. He approaches the policy as a superstructure established on the foundation of a compatible ideology, the social context, economic institutions and the political power landscape. The 200 years long process of the policy in transition is hence investigated as a 200 years course that witnessed the general transformation of the Ming ideological, social, economic and political structures. It is the historical undercurrent rather than spindrift that appeals to this book's historiography; it is a comprehensive study of the two particular centuries of the Ming society, of which the developments and characteristics have amazed not only historians.

Download or read book Fu Shan s World written by Qianshen Bai and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For 1,300 years, Chinese calligraphy was based on the elegant art of Wang Xizhi (A.D. 303–361). But the seventeenth-century emergence of a style modeled on the rough, broken epigraphs of ancient bronzes and stone artifacts brought a revolution in calligraphic taste. By the eighteenth century, this led to the formation of the stele school of calligraphy, which continues to shape Chinese calligraphy today. A dominant force in this school was the eminent calligrapher and art theorist Fu Shan (1607–1685). Because his work spans the late Ming–early Qing divide, it is an ideal prism through which to view the transformation in calligraphy. Rather than seek a single explanation for the change in calligraphic taste, the author demonstrates and analyzes the heterogeneity of the cultural, social, and political processes behind it. Among other subjects, the book covers the late Ming interaction between high and low culture; the role of publishing; the Ming loyalist response to the Qing; and early Qing changes in intellectual discourse. In addition to the usual approach of art historians, it adopts the theoretical perspectives of such fields as material culture, print culture, and social and intellectual history."

Download or read book Merchants and Society in Modern China written by Tang Lixing and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, merchants in China were incorporated into the bourgeoisie and constituted a vital part of the upstart capitalists. The lowermost class in ancient China’s social hierarchy has thus become a strong force of social transformation in the modern era. From the angle of the interaction between the merchant and modern society, this book examines the factors behind the rise of the merchant class in China, in terms of its cultural traits, inner structure, and business modes. First, it analyzes the features and historical standings of merchant culture which came into existence on the basis of reworking and integrating Neo-Confucianism. It argues that merchant culture pushed China’s early enlightenment movement to a new level. Then the rise of the bourgeoisie and their role in the evolution of modern Chinese society are studied thoroughly. More importantly, by examining the "golden age" of the merchant after the 1911 Revolution and its end brought by the Northern Expedition, this book studies the dilemmas faced by Chinese merchants. Finally, it probes into the reasons why it was hard for China to go beyond modern society, that is, completing the transition from commodity economy to capitalist economy. This book will deepen the understanding of China’s merchant class and modern Chinese society. Scholars and students in economics, history, sociology, and cultural studies will be attracted by it.

Download or read book A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep Hidden written by Zhi Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Li Zhi's iconoclastic interpretations of history, religion, literature, and social relations have fascinated Chinese intellectuals for centuries. His approach synthesized Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ethics and incorporated the Neo-Confucian idealism of such thinkers as Wang Yangming (1472–1529). The result was a series of heretical writings that caught fire among Li Zhi's contemporaries, despite an imperial ban on their publication, and intrigued Chinese audiences long after his death. Translated for the first time into English, Li Zhi's bold challenge to established doctrines will captivate anyone curious about the origins of such subtly transgressive works as the sixteenth-century play The Peony Pavilion or the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden), Li Zhi confronts accepted ideas about gender, questions the true identity of history's heroes and villains, and offers his own readings of Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha. Fond of vivid sentiment and sharp expression, Li Zhi made no distinction between high and low literary genres in his literary analysis. He refused to support sanctioned ideas about morality and wrote stinging social critiques. Li Zhi praised scholars who risked everything to expose extortion and misrule. In this sophisticated translation, English-speaking readers encounter the best of this heterodox intellectual's vital contribution to Chinese thought and culture.

Download or read book Publishing Culture and Power in Early Modern China written by Kai-wing Chow and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking book argues that printing—both with woodblocks and with movable type—exerted a profound influence on Chinese society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Download or read book The Figurative Works of Chen Hongshou 1599 652 written by TamaraHeimarck Bentley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the importance of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) as an artist and scholar of the Ming period, until now no full length study in English has focused on his work. Author Tamara H. Bentley takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach, treating Chen's oeuvre in relation to literary themes and economic changes, and linking these larger concerns to visual analyses. Considering Chen's paintings and prints alongside Chen's romance drama commentaries and prefaces and his collected writings (particularly poetry), Bentley sheds new light not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century. Through analysis of Chen's figure paintings and print designs, Bentley examines the artist's engagement with the values of "authenticity" and "emotion," which were part of a larger discourse stressing idiosyncrasy, the individual voice, and vernacular literature. She contrasts these values with the commercial aspects of his production, geared at an expanding art market of well-to-do buyers, excavating the apparent contradiction inherent in the two pursuits. In the end, she suggests, the emphasis on the "authentic" voice was marketed to a broad field of anonymous buyers. Though her primary focus is on Chen Hongshou, Bentley's investigation ultimately concerns not only this individual artist, but also the effect of early modern changes on an artist's mode of working and his self-image, in the West as well as the East. The study touches upon expanding international trade and the rise of middle class art markets (including print markets), not only in China but also in the Dutch Republic in circa 1630-1650. Bentley investigates the specific rhetoric of different categories of images, including Chen's non-literal figurative works; literal commemorative portraits; his printed romance-drama illustrations; and his printed playing cards. Bentley's investigation takes in issues of studio practice (including various types of image replicati

Download or read book The Figurative Works of Chen Hongshou 1599 1652 written by Tamara Heimarck Bentley and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the importance of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) as an artist and scholar of the late Ming period, until now no full length study in English has focused on his work. Author Tamara H. Bentley takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach, treating Chen's oeuvre in relation to literary themes and economic changes, and linking these larger concerns to visual analyses. In so doing, Bentley sheds new light not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century, when Chinese scholar artists began to direct their work towards anonymous public markets.

Download or read book Reading China electronic resource written by Daria Berg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume develops a new style of reading Chinese sources, as pioneered in Chinese Studies by Professor Glen Dudbridge, providing fascinating new insights into Chinese literature, history and popular culture. The analysis of self-fashioning, representation and political propaganda sheds new light on Chinese perceptions of the world.

Download or read book From Yuan to Modern China and Mongolia written by Morris Rossabi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging work, consisting of selected essays of Morris Rossabi, reflects the diverse interests of a leading scholar of China and Inner Asia. It encompasses the eras from the thirteenth century to the present, territories stretching from China to Mongolia to Central Asia and to the Middle East, and religions from Islam to Nestorian Christianity to Judaism and Confucianism in East, Central, and West Asia. Rossabi first challenged the conventional wisdom concerning traditional Chinese foreign relations by showing the pragmatism of Chinese officials who were not bound by Confucian strictures and stereotypes about foreigners and were actually knowledgeable about neighboring regions. His studies of the territories surrounding China led to the discovery of a major omission in historical writing—the lack of a biography of Khubilai Khan, one of the most renowned rulers in Eurasian history. His biography of Khubilai resulted in further studies of the Mongolian legacy on global history and of the significant role of women in the Mongolian empire. His repeated travels in Mongolia, in turn, stimulated an interest in modern Mongolia, especially the turbulence following the turbulence after the collapse of socialism in 1990, a subject he writes about in this book. The need for greater public knowledge and awareness of China, Mongolia, Central Asia, the Silk Roads, and Islam in Asia prompted Rossabi to write general, occasionally pedagogical, articles about these topics for a wider audience.