The Politics of the Past in Early China

ISBN-13: 9781108425728 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 212 str.

Vincent S. Leung

Opis

This is a study of the political uses of the past in early China. Engaging with a variety of historical materials, including inscriptional records, excavated manuscripts, and transmitted texts, it is a wide-ranging exploration of the fraught relationship between politics and historical imagination in ancient China.

Recenzje

'The Politics of the Past in Early China is an elegantly written book, and Leung's pithy summations provide food for thought and allow readers to easily follow his claims … offering both sophisticated readings and highly approachable overviews, Leung has managed the difficult task of writing a bridge-spanning book that will interest specialists as well as students just starting to explore early historical rhetoric and, indeed, Warring States and early imperial thought more broadly. I look forward to Leung's further considerations of these and other topics.' Luke Habberstad, Journal of Chinese History

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. Time out of joint: uses of the past from the Western Zhou to the early warring states; 2. A parenthetical past: deep history and anti-history in the late warring states; 3. Specter of the past: bureaucratic amnesia under the Rise of the Qin Empire; 4. The rehabilitation of antiquity in the early Han Empire; 5. Sima Qian's critical past; Epilogue.