Download or read book Science and Civilisation in China written by Joseph Needham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 1190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Short History of Paper in Imperial China written by Jean-Pierre Drège and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paper has become the most common writing material worldwide in the course of a two millennia history. This study provides a magisterial synthesis of recent scholarship and original insights into the origins of papermaking and its subsequent history in imperial China, including a wide range of archaeological evidence and literary sources. The volume introduces the materials and technologies of paper production and presents the cultural history of paper in traditional China. A comprehensive survey of literary sources on the production and use of paper is undertaken starting with the ongoing debate about the origin and genesis of paper, which was fuelled by recent archaeological discoveries of paper or proto-paper from the last two centuries BCE. In addition to its having become a popular writing material produced in many different qualities for both handwriting and printing, it also served as a material for wrapping or decorating, money and numerous uses in everyday life, such as umbrellas, windows, clothing, wallpapers, curtains and kites. Precious paper contributed to the aesthetics of calligraphy and painting, catering to the taste of the educated elite and artists.

Download or read book Science and Civilisation in China Volume 1 Introductory Orientations written by Joseph Needham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1954 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For contents, see Author Catalog.

Download or read book From Stone to Flesh written by Donald S. Lopez and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have come to admire Buddhism for being profound but accessible, as much a lifestyle as a religion. The credit for creating Buddhism goes to the Buddha, a figure widely respected across the Western world for his philosophical insight, his teachings of nonviolence, and his practice of meditation. But who was this Buddha, and how did he become the Buddha we know and love today? Leading historian of Buddhism Donald S. Lopez Jr. tells the story of how various idols carved in stone—variously named Beddou, Codam, Xaca, and Fo—became the man of flesh and blood that we know simply as the Buddha. He reveals that the positive view of the Buddha in Europe and America is rather recent, originating a little more than a hundred and fifty years ago. For centuries, the Buddha was condemned by Western writers as the most dangerous idol of the Orient. He was a demon, the murderer of his mother, a purveyor of idolatry. Lopez provides an engaging history of depictions of the Buddha from classical accounts and medieval stories to the testimonies of European travelers, diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries. He shows that centuries of hostility toward the Buddha changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the teachings of the Buddha, having disappeared from India by the fourteenth century, were read by European scholars newly proficient in Asian languages. At the same time, the traditional view of the Buddha persisted in Asia, where he was revered as much for his supernatural powers as for his philosophical insights. From Stone to Flesh follows the twists and turns of these Eastern and Western notions of the Buddha, leading finally to his triumph as the founder of a world religion.

Download or read book Bibliotheca Orientalis written by Luzac &co and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book From White to Yellow written by Rotem Kowner and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a groundbreaking study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.

Download or read book A Spectacular Failure written by Virginia La Grand and published by Brill. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines Defoe’s three-volume Robinson Crusoe series in the light of the ‘banter’ style he developed as a pamphleteer. That heavily ironic style had brought him renown but also put him in the pillory. The present study explores for the first time Defoe’s complaint that readers and pirate abridgers misread his tale of the would-be trader Robinson Crusoe. Using Discourse Analysis and Relevance Theory to examine the early abridgements of Volume I and Defoe’s subsequent two volumes, this study argues that Defoe’s greatest success is also a peculiar failure.

Download or read book Science and Civilisation in China Volume 3 Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth written by Joseph Needham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1959 with total page 1146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After two volumes mainly introductory, Dr Needham now embarks upon his systematic study of the development of the natural sciences in China. The Sciences of the Earth follow: geography and cartography, geology, seismology and mineralogy. Dr Needham distinguishes parallel traditions of scientific cartography and religious cosmography in East and West, discussing orbocentric wheel-maps, the origins of the rectangular grid system, sailing charts and relief maps, Chinese survey methods, and the impact of Renaissance cartography on the East. Finally-and here Dr Needham's work has no Western predecessors-there are full accounts of the Chinese contribution to geology and mineralogy.

Download or read book Sojourners in a Strange Land written by Florence C. Hsia and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise. Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China.

Download or read book Conceptualising China through translation written by James St. André and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph provides an innovative methodology for investigating how China has been conceptualised historically by tracing the development of four key cultural terms (filial piety, face, fengshui, and guanxi) between English and Chinese. It addresses how specific ideas about what constitutes the uniqueness of Chinese culture influence the ways users of these concepts think about China and themselves. Adopting a combination of archival research and mining of electronic databases, it documents how the translation process has been bound up in the production of new meaning. In uncovering how both sides of the translation process stand to be transformed by it, the study demonstrates the dialogic nature of translation and its potential contribution to cross-cultural understanding. It also aims to develop a foundation on which other area studies might build broader scholarship about global knowledge production and exchange.

Download or read book The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China Volume 5 written by Joseph Needham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fifth volume abridgement of Joseph Needham's monumental work is concerned with the staggering civil engineering feats made in early and medieval China.

Download or read book From Chinese Cosmology to English Romanticism written by Yu Liu and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A culturally sensitive and rewarding new understanding of the cross-cultural interaction between China and Europe In this important new work author Yu Liu argues that, confined by a narrow English and European conceptual framework, scholars have so far obscured the radical innovation and revolutionary implication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's monistic philosophy. Liu's innovative intellectual history traces the organic westward movement of the Chinese concept of tianren heyi, or humanity's unity with heaven. This monistic idea enters the European imaginary through Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci's understanding of Chinese culture, travels through Spinoza's identification of God with nature, becomes ingrained in eighteenth-century English thought via the langscaping theory and practice of William Kent and Horace Walpole, and emerges in the poetry and thought of Coleridge and Wordsworth. In addition to presenting a significantly different reading of the two English poets, Liu contributes to scholarship about English literary history, history of European philosophy and religion, English garden history, and cross-cultural interactions between China and Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

Download or read book Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods written by Gerald R. McDermott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-11 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of how American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) battled deist arguments about revelation and God's fairness to non-Christians. Author Gerald McDermott argues that Edwards was preparing before his death a sophisticated theological response to Enlightenment religion that was unparalleled in the eighteenth century and surprisingly generous toward non-Christian traditions.

Download or read book Crosses in the Sky written by Mark Bourrie and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr's death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit's "martyrdom" became one of the founding myths of Canada. In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary's fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf's accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

Download or read book Bibliographical Collections and Notes on Early English Literature Made During the Years 1893 1903 written by William Carew Hazlitt and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Objectifying China Imagining America written by Caroline Frank and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the ever-expanding presence of China in the global economy, Americans more and more look east for goods and trade. But as Caroline Frank reveals, this is not a new development. China loomed as large in the minds—and account books—of eighteenth-century Americans as it does today. Long before they had achieved independence from Britain and were able to sail to Asia themselves, American mariners, merchants, and consumers were aware of the East Indies and preparing for voyages there. Focusing on the trade and consumption of porcelain, tea, and chinoiserie, Frank shows that colonial Americans saw themselves as part of a world much larger than just Britain and Europe Frank not only recovers the widespread presence of Chinese commodities in early America and the impact of East Indies trade on the nature of American commerce, but also explores the role of the this trade in American state formation. She argues that to understand how Chinese commodities fueled the opening acts of the Revolution, we must consider the power dynamics of the American quest for china—and China—during the colonial period. Filled with fresh and surprising insights, this ambitious study adds new dimensions to the ongoing story of America’s relationship with China.

Download or read book Notes and Queries A Medium of Inter Communication for Literary Men Artists Antiquaries Genealogists Etc written by and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: