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The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition
Li Zehou (b. 1930) has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s. Before moving to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Li published works on Kant and traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy. The present volume, a translation of his Huaxia meixue (1989), is considered among Li’s most significant works. Apart from its value as an introduction to the philosophy of one of contemporary China’s foremost intellectuals, The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition fills an important gap in the literature of Chinese aesthetics in English. It presents Li’s synthesis of the entire trajectory of Chinese aesthetic thought, from ancient times to the early modern peri...
Abandoned Women and Boudoir Resentment
This book studies the formation of the male-constructed conventional voice of women in Chinese literature from the 3rd to 6th century. It highlights specific moments during which the feminine voice became recognized, accepted, and stabilized, including the shift of focus from the performative to the textual in female representations; the formation of a male literary community; the popularity of romanticized historical narratives; and the emerging sense of literary history. This study emphasizes the historicity of the feminine voice and strives to question and challenge established notions about textual stability, authorship, the literary canon, and literary history.
Language as Bodily Practice in Early China
Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney's interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers' intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius's proposal to rectify names (zhengming).
Neo-Confucian Ecological Humanism
Addresses Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhis neo-Confucianism from the perspective of contemporary ecological humanism. In this novel engagement with Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi (16191692), Nicholas S. Brasovan presents Wangs neo-Confucianism as an important theoretical resource for engaging with contemporary ecological humanism. Brasovan coins the term person-in-the-world to capture ecological humanisms fundamental premise that humans and nature are inextricably bound together, and argues that Wangs cosmology of energy (qi) gives us a rich conceptual vocabulary for understanding the continuity that exists between persons and the natural world. The book makes a signif...
The Worlds of Classical Chinese Aesthetics
This book presents the foundations of classical Chinese aesthetic discourse - roughly from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages - with the following animating questions: What is art? Why do we produce it? How do we judge it? The arts that garnered the most theoretical attention during this time period were music, poetry, calligraphy, and painting, and this book considers the reasons why these four were privileged. Whereas modern artists most likely consider themselves musicians or poets or calligraphers or painters or sculptors or architects, the pre-modern authors who produced the literature that established Chinese aesthetics prided themselves on being wenren, “cultured people,” conversant with all forms of art and learning. Other comparisons with Western theories and works of art are presented at due junctures. Key Features Addresses Chinese aesthetic discourse on its own terms Provides comparisons of key concepts and theories with examples from Western sources Includes more coverage of primary sources than any other English-language book on the subject Each chapter opens with a helpful summary, highlighting the chapter’s key themes
The Poetry of He Zhu (1052-1125)
The Northern Song poet He Zhu is best known for his lyrics (ci) but also produced shi poetry of subtlety, wit, and feeling. This study examines the latter as a response to the options available to a late-eleventh century writer in the pentametrical and heptametrical forms of Ancient Verse, Regulated Verse, and Quatrains. Numerous comparisons are made with Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, Du Fu, and other important writers. In a major advance over previous methodologies, the author uses a clear system of metrical notation to show how sound patterns reveal the poet's artistic and emotional intentions. This innovation and the author's other meticulous explorations of He Zhu's artistry allow us to experience Chinese poetry as never before. From the reader's report: "not just an excellent study of an individual poet but also a model of reading the language of classical Chinese poetry. [..] opens up a world of interpretive territory heretofore seldom explored."
Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire
This book is the winner of the 2020 Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard analyzes images of women in painting and poetry of China’s middle imperial period, focusing on works that represent female figures as preoccupied with romance. She discusses examples of visual and literary culture in regard to their authorship and audience, examining the role of interiority in constructions of gender, exploring the rhetorical functions of romantic images, and considering connections between subjectivity and representation. The paintings in particular have sometimes been interpreted as simple representations of the daily lives of women, or as straightforward artifacts of heteroerotic desire; Blanchard proposes that such works could additionally be interpreted as political allegories, representations of the artist’s or patron’s interiorities, or models of idealized femininity.
The Origins of Chinese Thought
Winner of the 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title "The Origins of Chinese Thought offers an account of the origins and nature of a uniquely Chinese way of thinking that, carried through Confucian tradition, continues to define the character of Chinese culture and society. Li Zehou argues that vestiges of the practices of early shamanistic ritual, rationalized in ritual regulations and internalized in morals and values, continue to shape Chinese thought and relationships. This outlook and its understanding of the world, the divine, ourselves, one another, what is right and what is good differ fundamentally from other world traditions. As an alternative to modern liberalism, it offers unique resources for addressing modern Chinese—and even global—philosophic and moral issues."
Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays
Liu Zaifu 劉再復 is a name that has already been ingrained within contemporary Chinese literary history. This landmark volume presents Anglophone readers with Liu’s profound reflections on Chinese literature and culture at different times. These critical essays deal with cultural criticism and literary theory, literary history, and individual modern and contemporary Chinese writers.
Li Zehou and Confucian Philosophy
For more than a century scholars both inside and outside of China have undertaken the project of modernizing Confucianism, but few have been as successful or influential as Li Zehou (b. 1930). Since the 1950s, Li’s extensive efforts in this regard have in turn exerted a profound influence on Chinese modernization and resulted in his becoming one of China’s most prominent social critics. To transform Confucianism into a contemporary resource for positive change in China and elsewhere, Li has reinterpreted major ideas and concepts of classical Confucianism, including a rereading of the entire Analects, replete with his own philosophical speculations derived from other Chinese and Western t...
