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The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China deftly examines the Bible's translation, expression, interpretation, and reception in China. Forty-eight essays address the translation of the Bible into China's languages and dialects; expression of the Bible in Chinese literary and religious contexts; Chinese biblical interpretations and methods of reading; and the reception of the Bible in the institutions and arts of China. This comprehensive and unique volume presents insightful, succinct, and provocative evidence about and interpretations of encounters between the Bible and China for centuries past, continuing into the present, and likely prospects for the future.
Reshaping the Boundaries: The Christian Intersection of China and the West in the Modern Era brings new material and new insight to deepen our understanding of the multilayered, two-way flow of words, beliefs, and experiences between the West and China from 1600 to 1900. The seven essays taken together illustrate the complex reality of boundary-crossing interactions between these cultures and document how hybrid ideas, images, and identities emerged in both China and the West. By focusing on “in-betweenness,” these essays challenge the existing Eurocentric assumption of a simple one-way cultural flow, with Western missionaries transmitting and the Chinese receiving. Led by Song Gang, the...
This book represents the first monograph-length study of the relationship between Protestant Bible translation and the development of Mandarin from a lingua franca into the national language of China. Drawing on both published and unpublished sources, this book looks into the translation, publication, circulation and use of the Mandarin Bible in late Qing and Republican China, and sets out how the Mandarin Bible contributed to the standardization and enrichment of Mandarin. It also illustrates that the Mandarin Union Version, published in 1919, was involved in promoting Mandarin as not only the standard medium of communication but also a marker of national identity among the Chinese people, thus playing a role in the nation-building of modern China.
The horrific text of Judges 19 is puzzling, especially to Chinese Christians who read the Chinese Union Version. This dominant translation of the Bible seems to place the blame for the tragedy on the concubine, which in turns legitimizes violence against women. Using tools of narrative, intertextual, and ideological criticism, Tsoi reveals an anti-Levite rhetoric in the text that has been neglected by translators. An examination of the translation context suggests that an anti-concubinage agenda in the social context of Republican China might have contributed to the bias in the translation, resulting in more than a century of misinterpretation among Chinese Christians.
Literature, from the Chinese perspective, makes manifest the cosmic patterns that shape and complete the world—a process of “worlding” that is much more than mere representation. In that spirit, A New Literary History of Modern China looks beyond state-sanctioned works and official narratives to reveal China as it has seldom been seen before, through a rich spectrum of writings covering Chinese literature from the late-seventeenth century to the present. Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors from throughout the world, this landmark volume explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres—pop song lyrics and presidential speeches, political treatises and pr...
This book examines the development of Chinese children’s literature from the late Qing to early Republican era. It highlights the transnational flows of knowledge, texts, and cultures during a time when children’s literature in China and the West was developing rapidly. Drawing from a rich archive of periodicals, novels, tracts, primers, and textbooks, the author analyzes how Chinese children’s literature published by Protestant missionaries and Chinese educators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presented varying notions of childhood. In this period of dramatic transition from the dynastic Qing empire to the new Republican China, young readers were offered different models of childhood, some of which challenged dominant Confucian ideas of what it meant to be a child. This volume sheds new light on a little-explored aspect of Chinese literary history. Through its contributions to the fields of children’s literature, book history, missionary history, and translation studies, it enhances our understanding of the negotiations between Chinese and Western cultures that shaped the publication and reception of Chinese texts for children.
It is well known that the Chinese church (and therefore Chinese theology) has been divided in the People's Republic of China into "registered" and "unregistered" churches, and that while the state-approved church offers theologies that align with the nation's socialist values, the unregistered or house churches have tended toward an evangelical theology that is now divaricating with the resurgence of denominations in China. What is less well known is that there has been a vibrant third field of Chinese theology: Sino-Christian theology, a contested, academic discourse that makes no claims to be a confessional theology. This theology, fostered by academics in secular Chinese universities, dev...
Bringing a fuzzy logic-based approach into translation studies and drawing on the theory of information entropy, this book discusses the translation of fuzzy language in literary works and advances a new method of measuring text fuzziness between translation and source text. Based on illustrative examples from the popular novel The Da Vinci Code and its two translated Chinese versions, the study demonstrates the fuzziness measuring method through an algorithmic process. More specifically, information entropy is applied to measure the uncertainty associated with readers’ understanding of the original and its corresponding target texts. The underlying hypothesis is that the probability distr...
This collection presents the proceedings of an international conference on the significance of the Rites Controversy in Sino-Western history, held in San Francisco in 1992. It contains fifteen articles by contemporary mainstream China scholars from four continents, including some of the most eminent names in Sinology today.