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Sharing the Light explores historical and philosophical shifts in the depiction of women and virtue in the early centuries of the Chinese state. These changes had far-reaching effects on both the treatment of women in Chinese society and on the formation of Chinese philosophical discourse on ethics, cosmology, epistemology, and self-cultivation. Warring States and Han dynasty narratives frequently represented women as intellectually adroit, politically astute, and ethically virtuous; these histories, discourses, and life stories portray women as active participants within their own society, not inert victims of it. The women depicted resembled sages, ministers, and generals as the mainstays ...
In Woman Rules Within: Domestic Space and Genre in Qing Vernacular Literature, Jessica Dvorak Moyer compares depictions of household space and women’s networks in texts across a range of genres from about 1600 to 1800 C.E. Analyzing vernacular transformations of classical source texts as well as vernacular stories and novels, Moyer shows that vernacular genres use expansive detail about architectural space and the everyday domestic world to navigate a variety of ideological tensions, particularly that between qing (emotion) and li (ritual propriety), and to flesh out characters whose actions challenge the norms of gendered spatial practice even as they ultimately uphold the gender order. Woman Rules Within contributes a new understanding of the role of colloquial language in late imperial literature.
Imperial Cults is a comparative study of the transformation of imperial religion and imperial authority in the early Han and Roman empires. During the reigns of the Emperor Wu of Han and Octavian Augustus of Rome, the rulers undertook substantial reforms to their respective systems of cult, at a time when they were re-shaping the idea of imperial authority and consolidating their own power. The changes made to religious institutions during their reigns show how these reforms were a fundamental part of the imperial consolidation. Employing a comparative methodology the author discusses some of the common strategies employed by the two rulers in order to centre religious and political authorit...
This book explores the material and cultural history of the Ming Dynasty based on the Chinese magnum opus Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan (literally, The Story of a Marital Fate to Awaken the World), written under the pseudonym of the seventeenth-century writer Xizhou Sheng. The novel weaves into its narrative, through the characters' personalities and the events it illustrates, important details of Ming material life. Through the literary snapshot of the Ming material culture as reflected in Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan, this work investigates the practices and customs of clothing, food, and travel, three of the "four major concerns of the people's livelihoods," known as yishizhuxing in Chinese. While frequ...
Is Confucianism a religion? If so, why do most Chinese think it isn't? From ancient Confucian temples, to nineteenth-century archives, to the testimony of people interviewed by the author throughout China over a period of more than a decade, this book traces the birth and growth of the idea of Confucianism as a world religion. The book begins at Oxford, in the late nineteenth century, when Friedrich Max Müller and James Legge classified Confucianism as a world religion in the new discourse of "world religions" and the emerging discipline of comparative religion. Anna Sun shows how that decisive moment continues to influence the understanding of Confucianism in the contemporary world, not on...
Explores ultimate realities in a range of world religions and discusses the issue and philosophical implications of comparison itself.
Written for his dissertation at Harvard in 1993, Hinsch's (history, National Chung Cheng U., Taiwan) fascinating study of women during the Qin and Han periods in China provides a useful addition to the history of ancient women as well as life in early imperial China. The lives of women and their roles are examined in several contexts, including cosmology, kinship, law, government, learning, and ritual. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Available in one or two volumes, this accessible, yet rigorous, introduction to the political, social, and cultural history of China provides a balanced and thoughtful account of the development of Chinese civilization from its beginnings to the present day. Each volume includes ample illustrations, a full complement of maps, a chronological table, extensive notes, recommendations for further reading and an index. Volume 1: From Neolithic Cultures through the Great Qing Empire (10,000 BCE—1799). Volume 2: From the Great Qing Empire through the People's Republic of China (1644—2009).
Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.
A deep and rigorous, yet eminently accessible introduction to the political, social, and cultural development of imperial Chinese civilisation, this volume develops a number of important themes -- such as the ethnic diversity of the early empires -- that other editions omit entirely or discuss only minimally. Includes a general introduction, chronology, bibliography, illustrations, maps, and an index.