This book argues that the most profound and far-reaching effects of Buddhism on Chinese culture occurred at the level of practice, specifically in religious rituals designed to cure people of disease, demonic possession, and bad luck. This practice would leave its most lasting imprint on the liturgical tradition of Taoism. In focusing on religious practice, the book provides a corrective to traditional studies of Chinese religion, which overemphasize metaphysics and spirituality.
Focusing on oracular texts, Chinese Poetry and Prophecy examines the role of divination in Chinese culture, particularly in religious practice. Drawing on a dazzling array of ancient and modern sources, the author establishes the oracular sequence of important but obscure works in his celebrated engaging style. This is the second posthumous work of Michel Strickmann to be to be edited by Bernard Faure for publication by Stanford University Press.
"This is the best study of a single Chinese poet I have seen in decades. And the best study of Du Fu known to me. David Schneider goes beyond previous works in revealing what might be called the source of Du Fu's gravitas. What is especially refreshing is that the author, while making use of well-selected modern authorities to cast light on Du Fu's poetry, is equally careful never to embrace their "theories" fully, with the ancillary danger of anachronism which taints so much contemporary "humanities" scholarship. The combination of empathy and critical thinking here is exemplary. The author writes eloquently and clearly, and is a very fine translator indeed, and gives us some of the very finest translations of Du Fu we now possess." - Jonathan Chaves, George Washington University
Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World explores the idea of literary history across the long span of the Chinese tradition. Although much scholarship on Chinese literature may be characterized as doing the work of literary history, there has been little theoretical engagement with received literary historical categories and assumptions, with how literary historical judgments are formed, and with what it means to do literary history in the first place. The present collection of essays addresses these questions from perspectives emerging both from within the tradition and from without, examining the anthological histories that shape the concept of a particular genre, the interpretive positions that impel our aesthetic judgments, the conceptual categories that determine how literary history is framed, and the history of literary historiography itself. As such, the essays collectively consider what it means to think through the framework of literary history, what literary history affords or omits, and what needs to be theorized in terms of literary history’s constraints and possibilities.
Divination was an important and distinctive aspect of religion in both ancient China and ancient Greece, and this book will provide the first systematic account and analysis of the two side by side. Who practised divination in these cultures and who consulted it? What kind of questions did they ask, and what methods were used to answer those questions? As well as these practical aspects, Lisa Raphals also examines divination as a subject of rhetorical and political narratives, and its role in the development of systematic philosophical and scientific inquiry. She explores too the important similarities, differences and synergies between Greek and Chinese divinatory systems, providing important comparative evidence to reassess Greek oracular divination.
Drawing on avant-garde traditions of Europe and the United States as well as on the traditions of classical Chinese poetry and prose, his work explores intense sensuality, the anguish of war, exile, the colonial experience, and conflicting views of national and cultural identity.
The May Fourth Movement launched an era of turmoil and transformation in China, as Western ideas and education encroached on the Confucian traditions at the root of Chinese society. The Republican period (1919–49) witnessed an outpouring of poetry in a form and style new to China, written in the common people’s language, baihua ("plain speech"). The New Poetry broke with the centuries-old tradition of classical poetry and its intricate forms, and the rise of China’s modern poetry reflects the rise of modern China. The Flowering of Modern Chinese Poetry presents English translations of over 250 poems by fifty poets, including a rich selection of poetry by women writers, to provide a nuanced picture of the rapid development of vernacular verse in China from its emergence during the May Fourth Movement, through the years of the Japanese invasion, to the Communist victory in the Civil War in 1949. Michel Hockx introduces the historical and literary contexts of the various schools of vernacular poetry that developed throughout the period – the pioneers, formalists, symbolists, "peasants and soldiers" poets, and Shanghai poets of the late 1940s. Each selection of verse begins with a biographical sketch of the author’s life and literary career, including their roles in the Civil War and Japanese occupation. Introducing English readers to master poets who are virtually unknown to Western audiences, this anthology presents a collection of verse written in an age of struggle that attests to the courage, sensitivity, and imagination of the Chinese people.
Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655) was an eminent Chinese Buddhist monk who, contrary to his contemporaries, believed karma could be changed. Through vows, divination, repentance rituals, and ascetic acts such as burning and blood writing, he sought to alter what others understood as inevitable and inescapable. Drawing attention to Ouyi's unique reshaping of religious practice, Living Karma reasserts the significance of an overlooked individual in the modern development of Chinese Buddhism. While Buddhist studies scholarship tends to privilege textual analysis, Living Karma promotes a balanced study of ritual practice and writing, treating Ouyi's texts as ritual objects and his reading and writing as religious acts. Each chapter addresses a specific religious practice—writing, divination, repentance, vows, and bodily rituals—offering first a diachronic overview of each practice within the history of Chinese Buddhism and then a synchronic analysis of each phenomenon through close readings of Ouyi's work. This book sheds much-needed light on a little-known figure and his representation of karma, which proved to be a seminal innovation in the religious thought of late imperial China.
Cultural Studies. Poetry. Yunte Huang's SHI: A RADICAL READING OF CHINESE POETRY is as much a bow to traditions of poetics across cultures as it is to linguistic efforts to bridge them. Huang concerns himself with the very act and implicative force of translation, especially when crossing gap in time and geography from classical Chinese poetry to the audience of the contemporary Anglophone West. His effort is described as "halfway between a hermeneutical cartography and a translation...to test and expand the reader's horizon of expectation"--Wai-Lim Yip. "Yunte Huang transforms our sense of 'Chineseness' by replacing the Orientalized scenic and stylistic tropes of traditional translations with multilivel encounters with the Chinese language"--Charles Bernstein.
