Transmitting Authority investigates the rise and fall of the cultural currency of the Confucian teacher Wang Tong (ca. 584-617), a.k.a. Master Wenzhong, in the five centuries following his death, by examining the textual and social history of the Zhongshuo, which purports to record Wang Tong's teachings. Incorporating theories and methodologies from textual criticism, the history of the book, and cultural studies, Warner reveals evidence of the Zhongshuo's textual fluidity during the Tang and early Song dynasties, and argues that this fluidity attended the shifting terms...

This book demonstrates the historical changes in early medieval China as seen in the tales of the supernatural--thematic transformation from traditional demonic retribution to Karmic retribution, from indigenous Chinese netherworld to Buddhist concepts of hell, and from the traditional Chinese savior to a new savior, Buddha. It also examines Buddhist imagery and the flourish of new motifs in the fantastic dreamworld and their relationship with Buddhism. This study relates the Youming lu to the development of popular Chinese Buddhist beliefs, attempting to single out ideas that differ...

The authors consider new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of China and East Asian languages. Based on recent debates initiated by Sheldon Pollock's findings for South Asia, we examine alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and re-examining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why East and SE Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese) should be analysed in light of a Eurocentric...

In Doing Good and Ridding Evil in Ming China: The Political Career of Wang Yangming, George Israel offers an account of this influential Neo-Confucian philosopher's official career and military campaigns. While his contribution to China's intellectual history and the outlines of his political life are well known, the relation between his thought and what he did in his capacity as a Ming official has been given less attention. Prior writing on Wang Yangming has passed judgment on his ideas by either idealizing or condemning him for how he treated those he was assigned to govern. Through...

There were over a thousand counties and prefectures in late imperial China; each loomed large in the hearts and minds of the local natives, and had a history of its own. The Order of Places tells a story of how these places were ordered by the long-lived imperial state, and then re-ordered during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as geographical mobility increased. At the center of the story are the mobile merchants from south China's Huizhou Prefecture, then the most prominent merchant group in China. The story presents the dynamics of geography in the world's most enduring...

Engaged with the paradigms of cultural geography, local history, spatial politics, and everyday life, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren unveils a Sichuan writer's lifelong quest: an independent historical fiction writing project on Chengdu from the turn of the century through China's 1911 Revolution. Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng's study illuminates the crisis of writing home in a globalized age by rescuing Li Jieren's repeatedly revised but never finished river-novel series written from Republican to Communist China, struggling to liberate local memory from the national cum revolutionary...

Experimental Chinese Literature is the first theoretical account of material poetics from the dual perspectives of translation and technology. Focusing on a range of works by contemporary Chinese authors including Hsia Yu, Chen Li, and Xu Bing, Tong King Lee explores how experimental writers engage their readers in multimodal reading experiences by turning translation into a method and by exploiting various technologies. The key innovation of this book rests with its conceptualisation of translation and technology as spectrums that interact in different ways to create sensuous,...

Nine renowned sinologists present a range of studies that display the riches of medieval Chinese verse in varied guises. All major verse-forms, including shi, fu, and ci, are examined, with a special focus on poetry's negotiation with tradition and historical context. Dozens of previously untranslated works are here rendered in English for the first time, and readers will enter a literary culture that was deeply infused with imperatives of wit, learning, and empathy. Among the diverse topics met with in this volume are metaphysical poetry as a medium of social exchange,...

Imitations of the Self reevaluates the poetry of Jiang Yan (444-505), long underappreciated because of its pervasive reliance on allusion, by emphasizing the self-conscious artistry of imitation. In context of "imitation poetry," the popular genre of the Six Dynasties era, Jiang's work can be seen as the culmination of central trends in Six Dynasties poetry. His own life experiences are encoded in his poetry through an array of literary impersonations, reframed in traditional literary forms that imbue them with renewed significance. A close reading of Jiang Yan's poetry demonstrates...

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China explores formal approaches to the study of philosophical texts to present new methods for the analysis of pre-modern thought in China. Attempts made by Chinese thinkers to generate literary forms of philosophical reasoning have gone unrecognised within scholarship in China and the West. Drawing together the expertise of leading scholars of early Chinese textuality, this volume addresses this omission by examining the formal characteristics of an argument, the interrelationship between form and content, as well as patterned compositions and...