Author: David Schaberg
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 530
Book Description
In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the fourth century BCE among the followers of Confucius. He contends that the coherent view of early China found in these texts is an effect of their origins and the habits of reading they impose. Rather than being totally accurate accounts, they represent the efforts of a group of officials and ministers to argue for a moralizing interpretation of the events of early Chinese history and for their own value as skilled interpreters of events and advisers to the rulers of the day.
A Patterned Past
Author: David Schaberg
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 530
Book Description
In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the fourth century BCE among the followers of Confucius. He contends that the coherent view of early China found in these texts is an effect of their origins and the habits of reading they impose. Rather than being totally accurate accounts, they represent the efforts of a group of officials and ministers to argue for a moralizing interpretation of the events of early Chinese history and for their own value as skilled interpreters of events and advisers to the rulers of the day.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 530
Book Description
In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the fourth century BCE among the followers of Confucius. He contends that the coherent view of early China found in these texts is an effect of their origins and the habits of reading they impose. Rather than being totally accurate accounts, they represent the efforts of a group of officials and ministers to argue for a moralizing interpretation of the events of early Chinese history and for their own value as skilled interpreters of events and advisers to the rulers of the day.
The Pattern of the Chinese Past
Author: Mark Elvin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804708760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of antiquity of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about 1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about 1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the others.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804708760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of antiquity of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about 1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about 1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the others.
Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan
Author:
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295806737
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 2243
Book Description
Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan; sometimes called The Zuo Commentary) is China�s first great work of history. It consists of two interwoven texts - the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu, a terse annalistic record) and a vast web of narratives and speeches that add context and interpretation to the Annals. Completed by about 300 BCE, it is the longest and one of the most difficult texts surviving from pre-imperial times. It has been as important to the foundation and preservation of Chinese culture as the historical books of the Hebrew Bible have been to the Jewish and Christian traditions. It has shaped notions of history, justice, and the significance of human action in the Chinese tradition perhaps more so than any comparable work of Latin or Greek historiography has done to Western civilization. This translation, accompanied by the original text, an introduction, and annotations, will finally make Zuozhuan accessible to all.
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295806737
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 2243
Book Description
Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan; sometimes called The Zuo Commentary) is China�s first great work of history. It consists of two interwoven texts - the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu, a terse annalistic record) and a vast web of narratives and speeches that add context and interpretation to the Annals. Completed by about 300 BCE, it is the longest and one of the most difficult texts surviving from pre-imperial times. It has been as important to the foundation and preservation of Chinese culture as the historical books of the Hebrew Bible have been to the Jewish and Christian traditions. It has shaped notions of history, justice, and the significance of human action in the Chinese tradition perhaps more so than any comparable work of Latin or Greek historiography has done to Western civilization. This translation, accompanied by the original text, an introduction, and annotations, will finally make Zuozhuan accessible to all.
Collecting the Self
Author: Sing-chen Lydia Chiang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047414845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Chinese strange tale collections contain short stories about ghosts and animal spirits, supra-human heroes and freaks, exotic lands and haunted homes, earthquake and floods, and other perceived “anomalies” to accepted cosmic and social norms. As such, this body of literature is a rich repository of Chinese myths, folklore, and unofficial “histories”. These collections also reflect Chinese attitudes towards normalcy and strangeness, perceptions of civilization and barbarism, and fantasies about self and other. Inspired in part by Freud’s theory of the uncanny, this book explores the emotive subtexts of late imperial strange tale collections to consider what these stories tell us about suppressed cultural anxieties, the construction of gender, and authorial self-identity.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047414845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Chinese strange tale collections contain short stories about ghosts and animal spirits, supra-human heroes and freaks, exotic lands and haunted homes, earthquake and floods, and other perceived “anomalies” to accepted cosmic and social norms. As such, this body of literature is a rich repository of Chinese myths, folklore, and unofficial “histories”. These collections also reflect Chinese attitudes towards normalcy and strangeness, perceptions of civilization and barbarism, and fantasies about self and other. Inspired in part by Freud’s theory of the uncanny, this book explores the emotive subtexts of late imperial strange tale collections to consider what these stories tell us about suppressed cultural anxieties, the construction of gender, and authorial self-identity.
How to Read Chinese Prose
Author: Zong-qi Cai
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441
Book Description
This book offers a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and its literary and cultural significance. It features more than one hundred major texts from antiquity through the Qing dynasty that exemplify major genres, styles, and forms of traditional Chinese prose. For each work, the book presents an English translation, the Chinese original, and accessible critical commentary by leading scholars. How to Read Chinese Prose teaches readers to appreciate the literary merits, stylistic devices, rhetorical choices, and argumentative techniques of a wide range of nonfictional writing. It emphasizes the interconnections among individual texts and across eras, helping readers understand the development of the literary tradition and what makes particular texts formative or distinctive within it. Organized by dynastic period and genre, the book identifies and examines four broad categories of prose—narrative, expository, descriptive, and communicative. How to Read Chinese Prose is suitable for a range of courses in Chinese literature, history, religion, and philosophy, as well as for scholars and interested readers seeking to deepen their knowledge of the Chinese prose tradition. A companion book, How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese, is designed for Chinese-language learners and features many of the same texts.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441
Book Description
This book offers a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and its literary and cultural significance. It features more than one hundred major texts from antiquity through the Qing dynasty that exemplify major genres, styles, and forms of traditional Chinese prose. For each work, the book presents an English translation, the Chinese original, and accessible critical commentary by leading scholars. How to Read Chinese Prose teaches readers to appreciate the literary merits, stylistic devices, rhetorical choices, and argumentative techniques of a wide range of nonfictional writing. It emphasizes the interconnections among individual texts and across eras, helping readers understand the development of the literary tradition and what makes particular texts formative or distinctive within it. Organized by dynastic period and genre, the book identifies and examines four broad categories of prose—narrative, expository, descriptive, and communicative. How to Read Chinese Prose is suitable for a range of courses in Chinese literature, history, religion, and philosophy, as well as for scholars and interested readers seeking to deepen their knowledge of the Chinese prose tradition. A companion book, How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese, is designed for Chinese-language learners and features many of the same texts.
A Companion to Global Historical Thought
Author: Prasenjit Duara
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118525361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538
Book Description
A COMPANION TO GLOBAL HISTORICAL THOUGHT A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, directly addressing issues of historiography in a globalized context. Questions concerning the global dissemination of historical writing and the relationship between historiography and other ways of representing the past have become important not only in the academic study of history, but also in public arenas in many countries. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book considers the problem of “the global” – in the multiplicity of traditions of narrating the past; in the global dissemination of modern historical writing; and of “the global” as a concept animating historical imaginations. It explores the different intellectual approaches that have shaped the discipline of history, and the challenges posed by modernity and globalization, while illustrating the shifts in thinking about time and the emergence of historical thought. Complementing A Companion to Western Historical Thought, this book places non-Western perspectives on historiography at the center of discussion, helping scholars and students alike make sense of the discipline at the start of the twenty-first century.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118525361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538
Book Description
A COMPANION TO GLOBAL HISTORICAL THOUGHT A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, directly addressing issues of historiography in a globalized context. Questions concerning the global dissemination of historical writing and the relationship between historiography and other ways of representing the past have become important not only in the academic study of history, but also in public arenas in many countries. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book considers the problem of “the global” – in the multiplicity of traditions of narrating the past; in the global dissemination of modern historical writing; and of “the global” as a concept animating historical imaginations. It explores the different intellectual approaches that have shaped the discipline of history, and the challenges posed by modernity and globalization, while illustrating the shifts in thinking about time and the emergence of historical thought. Complementing A Companion to Western Historical Thought, this book places non-Western perspectives on historiography at the center of discussion, helping scholars and students alike make sense of the discipline at the start of the twenty-first century.
Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China
Author: N. Harry Rothschild
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824874226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824874226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.
Mongols, Turks, and Others
Author: Reuven Amitai
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047406338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572
Book Description
The interaction between the Eurasian pastoral nomads - most famously the Mongols and Turks - and the surrounding sedentary societies is a major theme in world history. Nomads were not only raiders and conquerors, but also transmitted commodities, ideas, technologies and other cultural items. At the same time, their sedentary neighbours affected the nomads, in such aspects as religion, technology, and political culture. The essays in this volume use a broad comparative approach that highlights the multifarious nature of nomadic society and its changing relations with the sedentary world in the vicinity of China, Russia and the Middle East, from antiquity into the contemporary world.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047406338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572
Book Description
The interaction between the Eurasian pastoral nomads - most famously the Mongols and Turks - and the surrounding sedentary societies is a major theme in world history. Nomads were not only raiders and conquerors, but also transmitted commodities, ideas, technologies and other cultural items. At the same time, their sedentary neighbours affected the nomads, in such aspects as religion, technology, and political culture. The essays in this volume use a broad comparative approach that highlights the multifarious nature of nomadic society and its changing relations with the sedentary world in the vicinity of China, Russia and the Middle East, from antiquity into the contemporary world.
Pattern of the Past
Author: David L. Clarke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521227636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Book Description
The book will be of importance for archaeologists and of interest to anthropologists.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521227636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Book Description
The book will be of importance for archaeologists and of interest to anthropologists.
The Pattern
Author: Kevin Jeffers
Publisher: Kevin Jeffers
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 130
Book Description
WHAT IS THE PATTERN? This book shares my experiences as a soul traveler, healer, and energy specialist. It teaches how to achieve spiritual freedom through a unique expression of consciousness. I discovered this insight when my consciousness left my body during a deep meditation. Focusing my attention, I found myself in a limitless field of clear, sparkling, blue-and-white lines that intersected. These energy lines formed a grid, pulsating with starry lights, the countless manifestations of consciousness striving for greater self-awareness. What I experienced that day—what I call the “Pattern”—informed the rest of my life. Striving to know my soul’s origin and destination, I continue to merge with the Pattern to experience the Creator’s intent: the uplift of all forms of consciousness. The Pattern points to a pathway for you to experience a greater knowledge of Spirit’s ultimate design. * “This is a story of revelation and action, of the journey undertaken on the path to conscious living in both the physical and nonphysical worlds. It is not an easy path but made smoother by the insights that Kevin Jeffers brings to the subject. His stories are compelling. His prose helps illuminate what is essentially ineffable. Kevin brings a new lens on the two most fundamental inquiries of our time, the nature of Spiritual revelation and uplift of consciousness.” — DR. SCOTT TAYLOR Former President & Executive Director of the Monroe Institute
Publisher: Kevin Jeffers
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 130
Book Description
WHAT IS THE PATTERN? This book shares my experiences as a soul traveler, healer, and energy specialist. It teaches how to achieve spiritual freedom through a unique expression of consciousness. I discovered this insight when my consciousness left my body during a deep meditation. Focusing my attention, I found myself in a limitless field of clear, sparkling, blue-and-white lines that intersected. These energy lines formed a grid, pulsating with starry lights, the countless manifestations of consciousness striving for greater self-awareness. What I experienced that day—what I call the “Pattern”—informed the rest of my life. Striving to know my soul’s origin and destination, I continue to merge with the Pattern to experience the Creator’s intent: the uplift of all forms of consciousness. The Pattern points to a pathway for you to experience a greater knowledge of Spirit’s ultimate design. * “This is a story of revelation and action, of the journey undertaken on the path to conscious living in both the physical and nonphysical worlds. It is not an easy path but made smoother by the insights that Kevin Jeffers brings to the subject. His stories are compelling. His prose helps illuminate what is essentially ineffable. Kevin brings a new lens on the two most fundamental inquiries of our time, the nature of Spiritual revelation and uplift of consciousness.” — DR. SCOTT TAYLOR Former President & Executive Director of the Monroe Institute