Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!

You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.

Sign up

Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 359

Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China

Scholarship on early China has traditionally focused on a core group of canonical texts. However, understudied sources have the potential to shift perspectives on fundamental aspects of Chinese intellectual, religious, and political history. Yegor Grebnev examines crucial noncanonical texts preserved in the Yi Zhou shu (Neglected Zhou Scriptures) and the Grand Duke traditions, which represent scriptural traditions influential during the Warring States period but sidelined in later history. He develops an innovative framework for the study and interpretation of these texts, focusing on their role in the mediation of royal legitimacy and their formative impact on early Daoism. Grebnev demonstr...

Origins of Chinese Political Philosophy
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 514

Origins of Chinese Political Philosophy

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2017-05-08
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

Origins of Chinese Political Philosophy. explores the composition, language, thought, and early history of the Shangshu (Classic of Documents), showing its texts as dynamic cultural products that expressed and shaped the political and intellectual discourses of different times and communities.

Documentation and Argument in Early China
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 324

Documentation and Argument in Early China

This study uncovers the traditions behind the formative Classic Shàngshū (Venerated Documents). It is the first to establish these traditions—“Shū” (Documents)—as a historically evolving practice of thought-production. By focusing on the literary form of the argument, it interprets the “Shū” as fluid text material that embodies the ever-changing cultural capital of projected conceptual communities. By showing how these communities actualised the “Shū” according to their changing visions of history and evolving group interests, the study establishes that by the Warring States period (ca. 453–221 BC) the “Shū” had become a literary genre employed by diverse groups to legitimize their own arguments. Through forms of textual performance, the “Shū” gave even peripheral communities the means to participate in political discourse by conferring their ideas with ancient authority. Analysing this dynamic environment of socio-political and philosophical change, this study speaks to the Early China field, as well as to those interested in meaning production and foundational text formation more widely.

The Tsinghua University Warring States Bamboo Manuscripts Volume One: The Yi Zhou Shu and Pseudo-Yi Zhou Shu Chapters
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 341

The Tsinghua University Warring States Bamboo Manuscripts Volume One: The Yi Zhou Shu and Pseudo-Yi Zhou Shu Chapters

In July of 2008, Tsinghua University recovered a batch of Warring States bamboo slips from abroad. These were referred to as the Bamboo slips collected by Tsinghua University, i.e., the Tsinghua Manuscripts. A large part of the Tsinghua Manuscripts is comprised of early classical and historical texts. Among these, some can be compared with transmitted classics such as the Shang Shu or “Elevated Scriptures”, but many more are previously unseen texts that have been lost for over two-thousand years. These manuscripts have immense value for understanding the original state of pre-Qin classical texts and for reconstructing early Chinese history. A panel of experts convened to evaluate the man...

Neutrality and Collaboration in South China
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 343

Neutrality and Collaboration in South China

Analyses the uses of neutrality and collaboration in Second World War Macau, a small territory at the crossroads of different empires.

1919 – The Year That Changed China
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 258

1919 – The Year That Changed China

The year 1919 changed Chinese culture radically, but in a way that completely took contemporaries by surprise. At the beginning of the year, even well-informed intellectuals did not anticipate that, for instance, baihua (aprecursor of the modern Chinese language), communism, Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu would become important and famous – all of which was very obvious to them at the end of the year. Elisabeth Forster traces the precise mechanisms behind this transformation on the basis of a rich variety of sources, including newspapers, personal letters, student essays, advertisements, textbooks and diaries. She proposes a new model for cultural change, which puts intellectual marketing at its core. This book retells the story of the New Culture Movement in light of the diversifi ed and decentered picture of Republican China developed in recent scholarship. It is a lively and ironic narrative about cultural change through academic infi ghting, rumors and conspiracy theories, newspaper stories and intellectuals (hell-)bent on selling agendas through powerful buzzwords.

Spring and Autumn Historiography
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 354

Spring and Autumn Historiography

The Spring and Autumn is an annals text composed of brief records covering the period 722–479 BCE and written from the perspective of the ancient Chinese state of Lu. A long neglected part of the Chinese canon, it is traditionally ascribed to Confucius, who is said to have embedded his evaluations of events within the text. However, the formulaic and impersonal records do not resemble the repository of moral judgments that they are alleged to be. Driven by her discovery that the Spring and Autumn is governed by a system of rules, Newell Ann Van Auken argues that Lu record-keepers—not a later editor—produced the formally regular core of the text. She demonstrates that the Spring and Aut...

Pindar’s Pythian Twelve: A Linguistic Commentary and a Comparative Study
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 282

Pindar’s Pythian Twelve: A Linguistic Commentary and a Comparative Study

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2024-04-18
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

Pindar’s Pythian Twelve is the only choral lyric epinicion in our possession composed for the winner of a non-athletic competition. Often regarded as an ode of straightforward interpretation, close analysis of the text reveals that it presents several challenges to modern readers. This book offers an updated translation of the text and an investigation of the main interpretative issues of the epinicion with the aid of historical linguistics. By identifying devices which Pindar might have inherited from earlier periods of poetic language, the study provides insights into the thematic aspects of the ode as well as on Pindar’s compositional technique.

The Dragon and the Rainbow
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 369

The Dragon and the Rainbow

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2023-08-21
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

Modernization and conversion to world religions are threatening the survival of traditional belief systems, leaving behind only mysterious traces of their existence. This book, based upon extensive research conducted over a period of nearly four decades, brings scientific rigor to one of the questions that have always attracted human curiosity: that of the origin of the dragon. The author demonstrates that both dragons and rainbows are cultural universals, that many of the traits that are attributed to dragons in widely separated parts of the planet are also attributed to rainbows, and that the number and antiquity of such shared traits cannot be attributed to chance or common inheritance, but rather to common cognitive pathways by which human psychology has responded to the natural environment in a wide array of cultures around the world.

Myth and the Making of History
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 412

Myth and the Making of History

Myth and the Making of History examines the relationship between myth and history in early China, a topic that has been explored by American paleographer and scholar of ancient China Sarah Allan throughout her career. Allan has worked at a crucial and sensitive intersection, where myth and history collide at the very heart of China's origin story. Her work has created an intellectual space in which the disciplines of philosophy, history, anthropology, archeology, philology, and literature have come together, helping to change the way scholars conceive of historical patterns in China's past. In Myth and the Making of History, eleven senior and emerging scholars, from both China and the West, respond to the intellectual challenge raised by Allan's theoretical model of analysis of mythologized and historical figures (and even dynasties) that have intrigued scholars for generations and play a central role in the Chinese historical imagination. The book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of China—of whatever level and discipline—and, indeed, those concerned with other early civilizations as well.