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Analyzes the use of anecdotes as an essential rhetorical tool and form of persuasion in various literary genres in early China. Between History and Philosophy is the first book-length study in English to focus on the rhetorical functions and forms of anecdotal narratives in early China. Edited by Paul van Els and Sarah A. Queen, this volume advances the thesis that anecdotesbrief, freestanding accounts of single events involving historical figures, and occasionally also unnamed persons, animals, objects, or abstractionsserved as an essential tool of persuasion and meaning-making within larger texts. Contributors to the volume analyze the use of anecdotes from the Warring States Period to the Han Dynasty, including their relations to other types of narrative, their circulation and reception, and their central position as a mode of argumentation in a variety of historical and philosophical literary genres.
This volume offers the most comprehensive introduction to the ideas of ancient Chinese thinkers who looked to perfect a political system thru the emphasis on impersonal standards, laws, and norms (fa). This book covers the works of these thinkers, misleadingly dubbed Legalists, as well as the controversies they aroused, the legacy they left behind, and their potential relevance. The fa thinkers contributed decisively to the formation of China’s first unified empire in 221 BCE, but this contribution was not widely acknowledged. Their derision of the moralizing discourse of their rivals, dismissal of independent intellectuals as self-serving hypocrites, and advocacy of a powerful centralized...
The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition (trad. dated to the 4th cent. B.C.) mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language. The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds. This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”.
Scholarship on early China has traditionally focused on a core group of canonical texts. However, understudied sources have the potential to shift perspectives on fundamental aspects of Chinese intellectual, religious, and political history. Yegor Grebnev examines crucial noncanonical texts preserved in the Yi Zhou shu (Neglected Zhou Scriptures) and the Grand Duke traditions, which represent scriptural traditions influential during the Warring States period but sidelined in later history. He develops an innovative framework for the study and interpretation of these texts, focusing on their role in the mediation of royal legitimacy and their formative impact on early Daoism. Grebnev demonstr...
Contains bibliographies and book reviews.
A renewed attention to visual culture is one of the recent developments in the study of cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The subject of this book is the illustrated Life of Christ presented to the Chinese emperor in 1640 by the Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell S.J. (1592-1666). The origin of the work is a small parchment booklet with coloured miniature paintings based on a wide variety of prints by well-known European engravers (e.g., H. Goltzius, J. Stradanus). It was compiled in Munich in 1617 and a Chinese version with the title Jincheng shuxiang was published in Beijing more than twenty years later in a nicely illustrate...
A deeply researched and thought-provoking set of essays on a sorely-neglected topic in Chinese economic, intellectual, and political history.
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