Download or read book Narrative Devices in the Shiji written by Lei Yang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-04-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative Devices in the Shiji: Retelling the Past offers the first systematic analysis of narratives in early Chinese historical writings from 400 BCE to 100 CE, with a focus on the Shiji (Records of the Historian), a vast collection of historical accounts completed by Sima Qian (145–86 BCE). For centuries, the dominant approach to the Shiji has been to infer Sima's intentions from his biographical experiences and subsequently project them back into the text. This has caused the import of the work to be overshadowed by Sima's tragedy of castration, and has minimized the question of how narrative as a form affects the text's interpretation. Lei Yang fills the gap by exploring how Sima manipulated the Shiji's narrative structure to represent the past. Drawing on Gérard Genette's narratological theories, the book examines how sequences of events build causality, what is slowed down and sped up to manage information control, and how the text provides multiple perspectives on the same events. Redefining the Shiji's place as a turning point in Chinese textual history, Narrative Devices in the Shiji sheds light on the evolution of early Chinese historiography. As an interdisciplinary dialogue between Chinese texts and the Western theories, it opens the Shiji to new interpretations and provides a novel framework for Chinese historical writings.
Download or read book The Worlds of Classical Chinese Aesthetics written by Paul R. Goldin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the foundations of classical Chinese aesthetic discourse - roughly from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages - with the following animating questions: What is art? Why do we produce it? How do we judge it? The arts that garnered the most theoretical attention during this time period were music, poetry, calligraphy, and painting, and this book considers the reasons why these four were privileged. Whereas modern artists most likely consider themselves musicians or poets or calligraphers or painters or sculptors or architects, the pre-modern authors who produced the literature that established Chinese aesthetics prided themselves on being wenren, “cultured people,” conversant with all forms of art and learning. Other comparisons with Western theories and works of art are presented at due junctures. Key Features Addresses Chinese aesthetic discourse on its own terms Provides comparisons of key concepts and theories with examples from Western sources Includes more coverage of primary sources than any other English-language book on the subject Each chapter opens with a helpful summary, highlighting the chapter’s key themes
Download or read book The Cloudy Mirror written by Stephen W. Durrant and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sima Qian's writings have influenced the Chinese for over 2,000 years and still serve as a fiscal source of historical information about China.
Download or read book Pushing the Boundaries of Historia written by Mary C English and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pushing the Boundaries of Historia collects together 20 chapters, whose coverage extends from the prehistory of Greece through early Christianity in the Roman Empire to the reception of classical texts by contemporary playwrights and poets. The essays range beyond Greece and Rome to the ancient realms of Persia and China and explore a vast array of ancient authors – Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Euripides, Vergil, Ovid, Livy, and Tacitus. Written by philologists, historians, epigraphers, palaeographers, archaeologists, and art historians, it brings together the best of old and new traditions of classical study, from senior emeritus faculty with established records of scholarly productivity, to the newest generation of classics and archaeology professors. What draws together the disparate strands of academic inquiry found in these pages is a passion for understanding how the lessons of the world of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and their still lamentably understudied neighbors, can offer commentary on the contemporary world.
Download or read book Epic And Other Higher Narratives Essays In Intercultural Studies written by Shankman Steven and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization written by Roy Starrs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Topics include: Government Intervention and Economic Growth in East Asia, Agricultural Nationalism in the Age of Globalization, Japan's Dominance and Multi- Racial Coalitions in Malaysia.
Download or read book Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece Rome and China written by Hans Beck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative study of the ancient Mediterranean and Han China, seen through the lens of political culture.
Download or read book Literary Information in China written by Bruce Rusk and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Information” has become a core concept across the disciplines, yet it is still often seen as a unique feature of the Western world that became central only in the digital age. In this book, leading experts turn to China’s textual tradition to show the significance of information for reconceptualizing the work of literary history, from its beginnings to the present moment. Contributors trace the organization of literary information across China’s three millennia of history, examining the forms and practices of information management that have evolved alongside the increasing scale and complexity of textual production. They reimagine literary history as information processing, detailing the many kinds of storage, encoding, sorting, and transmission that constitute and feed back into China’s long and ever-growing cultural tradition. The volume features state-of-the-field essays on all major forms of literary information management, from graphs to internet literature, and from commentaries to literary museums and archives. By shifting focus from individual works and their authors to the informatic schemata of literature, it identifies three scales of information management—the word, the document, and the collection—and surveys the forms that operate at each level, such as the dictionary, the anthology, and the library. Literary Information in China is a groundbreaking work that provides a systematic and innovative reassessment of literary history with implications that extend beyond the particular Chinese context, revealing how informatic practices shape literary tradition.
Download or read book Chinese Theories of Fiction written by Ming Dong Gu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative work, Ming Dong Gu examines Chinese literature and traditional Chinese criticism to construct a distinctly Chinese theory of fiction and places it within the context of international fiction theory. He argues that because Chinese fiction, or xiaoshuo, was produced in a tradition very different from that of the West, it has formed a system of fiction theory that cannot be adequately accounted for by Western fiction theory grounded in mimesis and realism. Through an inquiry into the macrocosm of Chinese fiction, the art of formative works, and theoretical data in fiction commentaries and intellectual thought, Gu explores the conceptual and historical conditions of Chinese fiction in relation to European and world fiction. In the process, Gu critiques and challenges some accepted views of Chinese fiction and provides a theoretical basis for fresh approaches to fiction study in general and Chinese fiction in particular. Such masterpieces as the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the Hongloumeng (The Story of the Stone) are discussed at length to advance his notion of fiction and fiction theory.
Download or read book Asia Major written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lore and Verse written by Yue Zhang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lore and Verse is the first English-language book dedicated entirely to studying poems on history (yongshi shi) in premodern China. Focusing on works by poets from the entire range of early medieval China (220–589), Yue Zhang explores how history was disseminated and interpreted through poetry, as well as how and why certain historical figures were commemorated in poetry. In writing poems on history, poets retrospectively crafted their own identities through their celebration of historical figures, and they prospectively fortified a continuous lineage for transmitting their values and reputation to future generations. This continuous tradition of cultural memory informs a poet's reception of historical figures, which in turn shapes that tradition through further intertextual connections. Lore and Verse questions the sweeping generalization of early medieval Chinese poetry as consisting mainly of exuberant images and an ornamental style—an inaccurate characterization repeated by later historians and literary critics—and it provides translations, close readings, and analyses of selected poems on history that will be useful for students, instructors, and general readers interested in premodern Chinese literature and culture.
Download or read book Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo written by Grant Hardy and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999-07-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sima Qian (c. 100 B.C.E.) was China's first historian—he was known as Grand Astrologer at the court of Emperor Wu during the Han dynasty—and, along with Confucius and the First Emperor of Qin, was one of the creators of imperial China. His Shiji (published for Columbia in a translation by Burton Watson as Records of the Grand Historian) not only became the model for the twenty-six Standard Histories that the historians of each Chinese dynasty wrote to legitimize the dynastic succession, but also has been an enormously influential resource to historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and many others seeking an understanding of early Chinese history. In Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, Grant Hardy presents convincing evidence that the Shiji is quite unlike such Western counterparts as the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, for, Hardy argues, Sima Qian's work seeks not only to represent but to influence the world in a manner based on Confucian concepts of sageliness and "the rectification of names." Although many scholars have sought close parallels between Sima Qian and the Greek historians—either criticizing Sima's work, as if Western models of historical interpretation could serve as a template by which to read it, or overemphasizing his "objectivity" to more closely align his text with these "respectable" Greek models—Hardy boldly contends that the Chinese historian never intended to produce a consistent, closed interpretation of the past. Instead, Hardy argues, the Shiji is a microcosm in which Sima Qian sought to represent the open-endedness and multivalence of the world around him, revealing and reinforcing the natural order. In mapping out this model of the world, Sima embodies the historian as sage rather than chronicler. Transcending mere accuracy in recording events, such a historian seeks not to present an opinion about what happened in the past, buttressed with rational arguments and pertinent evidence, but to penetrate the outer details of an incident and discover the moral truths it embodies. Thus intuiting the moral significance of events, the sage-historian delineates the Way and offers his readers a chance to become more in tune with the natural order. Illustrating his provocative theses about the Shiji by analyzing Sima Qian's handling of specific historical personages and episodes such as the First Emperor of the Qin, the hereditary house of Confucius, and the conflicts that ended with the founding of the Han dynasty, Hardy both extends and challenges existing interpretations of this crucial yet understudied text and sheds light on its puzzles and incongruities.
Download or read book Utopian Fiction in China written by Shuk Man Leung and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike previous studies that have examined the late Qing utopian imagination as an ahistorical motif, a literary theme, and a translation phenomenon, in this book Shuk Man Leung considers utopian fiction as a knowledge apparatus that helped develop Chinese nationalism and modernity. Based on untapped primary sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese, her research reveals how utopian imagination, blooming after Liang Qichao’s publication of The Future of New China, served as a tool of knowledge formation and dissemination that transformed China’s public sphere and catalysed historical change. Embracing interdisciplinary approach from genre studies, studies on modern Chinese newspapers and intellectual history, this book provides an analysis of the development of utopian literary practices, epistemic meanings, and fictional narratives and the interactions between traditional and imported knowledge that helped shape the discourse in early 20th century China.
Download or read book Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer written by Wendy Larson and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese writers have confronted the problem of creating a new literary tradition that both maintains the culturally unique aspects of a rich heritage and succeeds in promoting a new modernity. In the first book-length treatment of the topic, Wendy Larson examines the contradictory forms of authority at work in the autobiographical texts of modern Chinese writers and scholars and the way these conflicts helped to shape and determine the manner in which writers viewed themselves, their texts, and their work. Larson focuses on the most famous writers associated with the May Fourth Movement, a group most active in the 1920s and 1930s, and their fundamental ambivalence about writing. She analyzes how their writing paradoxically characterized textual labor as passive, negative, and inferior to material labor and the more physical political work of social progress, and she describes the ways they used textual means to devalue literary labor. The impact of China's increasing contact with the West--particularly the ways in which Western notions of "individualism" and "democracy" influenced Chinese ideologies of self and work--is considered. Larson also studies the changes in China's social structure, notably those linked to the abolition in 1905 of the educational exam system, which subsequently broke the link between the mastery of certain texts and the attainment of political power, further denigrating the cultural role of the writer.
Download or read book Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue written by Jianjun He and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue is the first complete English translation of Wu Yue Chunqiu, a chronicle of two neighboring states during China's Spring and Autumn period. This collection of political history, philosophy, and fictional accounts depicts the rise and fall of Wu and Yue and the rivalry between them, the inspiration for centuries of poetry, vernacular fiction, and drama. Wu Yue Chunqiu makes use of rich sources from the past, carefully adapting and developing them into complex stories. Historical figures are transformed into distinctive characters; simple records of events are fleshed out and made tangible. The result is a nuanced record that is both a compelling narrative and a valuable historical text. As one of the earliest examples of a regional history, Wu Yue Chunqiu is also an important source for the history of what is now Zhejiang and Jiangsu. In Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue, Jianjun He's engaging translation and extensive annotations make this significant historical and literary work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.
Download or read book Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing written by Ming Dong Gu and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work provides a systematic study of Chinese theories of reading and writing in intellectual thought and critical practice. The author maintains that there are two major hermeneutic traditions in Chinese literature: the politico-moralistic mainstream and the metaphysico-aesthetical undercurrent. In exploring the interaction between the two, Ming Dong Gu finds a movement toward interpretive openness. In this, the Chinese practice anticipates modern and Western theories of interpretation, especially literary openness and open poetics. Classic Chinese works are examined, including the Zhouyi (the I Ching or Book of Changes), the Shijing (the Book of Songs or Book of Poetry), and selected poetry, along with the philosophical background of the hermeneutic theories. Ultimately, Gu relates the Chinese practices of reading to Western hermeneutics, offering a cross-cultural conceptual model for the comparative study of reading and writing in general.
Download or read book Buddhist Historiography in China written by John Kieschnick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Toshihide Numata Book Award, Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha’s life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decline in the religion’s fortunes under various rulers. They searched for evidence of karma in the historical record and drew on prophecy to explain the past. John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks not so much for what they reveal about the people and events they describe as for what they tell us about their compilers’ understanding of history. Kieschnick examines how Buddhist doctrines influenced the search for the underlying principles driving history, the significance of genealogy in Buddhist writing, and the transformation of Buddhist historiography in the twentieth century. This book casts new light on the intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism and on Buddhists’ understanding of the past.
