This work covers Su Shi's intellectual life and how this affected his life as an official and as a private person. It discusses his view of the Way (dao) of the ancient sages of China and its transmission, the Confucian classics, and his views on Buddhism and Daoism.
This work covers Su Shi's intellectual life and how this affected his life as an official and as a private person. It discusses his view of the Way (dao) of the ancient sages of China and its transmission, the Confucian classics, and his views on Buddhism and Daoism.
The Northern Song (960–1126) was one of the most transformative periods in Chinese literary history, characterized by the emergence of printing and an ensuing proliferation of books. The poet Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), writing at the height of this period, both defined and was defined by these changes. The first focused study on the cultural consequences of printing in Northern Song China, this book examines how the nascent print culture shaped the poetic theory and practice of Huang Tingjian and the Jiangxi School of Poetry he founded. Author Yugen Wang argues that at the core of Huang and the Jiangxi School’s search for poetic methods was their desire to find a new way of reading and writing that could effectively address the changed literary landscape of the eleventh century. Wang chronicles the historical and cultural negotiation Huang and his colleagues were conducting as they responded to the new book culture, and opens new ground for investigating the literary interpretive and hermeneutical effects of printing. This book should be of interest not only to scholars and readers of classical Chinese poetry but to anyone concerned with how the material interacts with the intellectual and how technology has influenced our conception and practice of reading and writing throughout history.
"The intense piety of late T’ang essays on Buddhism by literati has helped earn the T’ang its title of the “golden age of Chinese Buddhism.” In contrast, the Sung is often seen as an age in which the literati distanced themselves from Buddhism. This study of Sung devotional texts shows, however, that many literati participated in intra-Buddhist debates. Others were drawn to Buddhism because of its power, which found expression and reinforcement in its ties with the state. For some, monasteries were extravagant houses of worship that reflected the corruption of the age; for others, the sacrifice and industry demanded by such projects were exemplars worthy of emulation. Finally, Buddhist temples could evoke highly personal feelings of filial piety and nostalgia. This book demonstrates that representations of Buddhism by lay people underwent a major change during the T’ang–Sung transition. These changes built on basic transformations within the Buddhist and classicist traditions and sometimes resulted in the use of Buddhism and Buddhist temples as frames of reference to evaluate aspects of lay society. Buddhism, far from being pushed to the margins of Chinese culture, became even more a part of everyday elite Chinese life."
"Dragon's Gate is a superb book, a fascinating story written from the heart and woven into a complex cultural and historical tapestry - a modern classic in the making." - Robert Macklin, author of Dragon and Kangaroo Shi Ding is seventeen. In an attempt to impress a girl, he joins a local Red Guard unit and succeeds in having a nine-year-old boy arrested and a widowed professor of foreign literature driven to a shameful suicide. But when his father's death is also revealed as suicide, Shi Ding is expelled from the gang. He suspects there was more to the relationship between his father and the professor than friendship and he moves into her empty house. There he discovers a library of translations of forbidden Western classics. Himself a born storyteller, he is transfixed by the stories in these books by the likes of Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Hugo, Dickens, and Dumas … Set in China in the mid-60s, Dragon's Gate is about the power of storytelling. Within its overarching narrative, there are stories of little-known worlds: river logging in remote mountains, armed fighting between Red Guard factions, fortune telling on long train journeys, community life in the courtyards of Beijing hutong. Memorable characters abound in this rich and varied tale - characters like Sun Lanfen, the nosy, tough but decent residential compound leader; the blind singer who was struck dumb when he had to sing songs set to Chairman Mao's quotations; and the Buffalo Boy who was reputed to have fathered a hundred children in a Tibetan village. "The unique interweaving of fascinating tales set in exotic places with familiar and much loved western classics makes this book a page turner from beginning to end." - Jane Sydenham-Kwiet, German teacher and translator
This book is a life and works study of the most successful Chinese novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s-1940s, the popularity of Zhang's work among readers was immense, but it was denigrated as commercial, ideologically backward writing during an age when literature in China was dominated by the leftist politics and Europeanising aesthetics of the May Fourth Movement. The author demonstrates, by detailed philological analysis, how Zhang Henshui chose to retain the form and language of the old-style Chinese novel, but to assimilate techniques and content from May Fourth writing as a means of improving traditional fiction while catching up with the times. In this by far most comprehensive survey of Zhang's fictional work in any Western language, the author identifies, with impressive literary sensitivity, a number of phases of development and retrogression, as Zhang Henshui moved away gradually from writing fiction for entertainment and comfort to writing more disturbing and engaging work. and appendices from the most outstanding novels in exquisite English translation offer a lively impression of the experience of reading Zhang Henshui novels. The bibliography includes a most valuable detailed chronological list of Zhang's works. This book will also be of interest to scholars of Republican-era Chinese culture and history in general, as well as to scholars of comparative literature and general literary theory.
Revising her Ph.D. dissertation in comparative literature for the University of North Carolina, where she now teaches, Zeng deconstructs Chinese natural philosophy into time, self, and language, with time as the primary rupture that triggers the other two. She considers a variety of art forms, including Taoism and Zen Buddhism, classical Chinese painting, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, the contemporary film Farewell, My Concubine, linguistic characteristics of classical Chinese poetry, and modern American poetry. Then she analyzes in detail the work of several classical Chinese poets. The text is double spaced. Annotation :2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
The Confucian Lunyu (The Analects) is perhaps the most important text in the Confucian canon. Scholars have studied it and written about it for two millennia but little careful historical analysis has been done on the text. especially from the perspective of a particular social group. In this work the Lunyu is interpreted from the perspective of the social group known as shi (officers or potential officers). Confucius and his disciples, all living between the late Chunqiu or Spring and Autumn period (770-481 B.C.) and the Zhanguo or Warring States period (481-221 B.C.), were members of the shi class and the Lunyu records anecdotes about them as well as their conversations and statements said to have originated with them. The contribution of this study to the field of scholarship is two-fold. It clarifies the meaning of the term shi (variously translated as scholar, man of service, man of excellence. and officer) that has been rendered ambiguous in Chinese classical literature because its terms of reference have changed over time. text by providing a historical context from the perspective of the shi as a social group and allows us to explain some of the inconsistencies in the text. This work also addresses some controversial claims presented in the work of Robert Eno and Bruce and Taeko Brooks. Given the central canonical status of the Lunyu. this new analysis of the text will be of interest to scholars concerned with the history of Chinese thought.
In Dialectics of Spontaneity, Zhiyi Yang examines the aesthetic and ethical theories of Su Shi, the primary poet, artist, and statesman of Northern Song.