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The series Worlds of East Asia of the Swiss Asia Society publishes high-quality research on present-day and historical East Asian cultures and societies covering fields such as history, literature, philosophy, politics and arts, as well as interpretations and translations of primary sources. Furthermore the series presents studies focusing on current topics and affairs appealing not only to the academic public, but also to a public generally interested in East Asia.
The series provides a forum for scholarly work in the fields of humanities and social sciences in Switzerland. However, the series is also committed to the rich variety of studies and writing on East Asia in the international research community. The principal languages of publication of monographs and anthologies are German, French and English.
The series is supervised by an editorial board which is advised by representatives in East Asian Studies.
This book offers a path-breaking survey of the various efforts to rethink, methodologically delimit, enact, and represent the changing relationship between the modernizing nation-state of China, its premodern history and culture, and its endemic and/or iconic plants. It is a literature and philosophy as well as cultural history contribution to the sinological academia.By exploring the entanglement of plants in the construction of national identity in modern China, it demonstrates that, by joining the world scientific stage through categorization and compilation of its objects, the nation has braided its own time and space into the world system, and renjian caomu (the grass and trees of the human world) thusbecame minzu zhiwu (ethno-plants). Moreover, all those different embodiments of caomu, national flower candidates, shuishan, ethno-plants, plane trees and ginkgos, each summon certain temporal and spatial angles and features, hovering between cultural symbolism and modern horticulture. They all join the transformation in which the location of China is anchored on the world map and on the natural land, while its past and future are imagined and rewritten in the form of Chinese history and modernity.
This volume presents an investigation of the category of the spatial based on Chinese philosophical and art theoretical texts of the 17th century. The epistemological reconstructions and analyses of source examples present the conceptions of space at the intersections of Chinese scholars' reflections on reality, the universe, human cognition, and linguistic and visual expressive capacities.
The study focuses on the writings of Hong Kong philosopher Lao Sze-kwang (1927–2012) from the 1950s onward. His work in reception and cultural theory shows how liberal viewpoints were debated in the colonial-influenced environment of the Cold War. In both university and public discourse, Confucian values and ideas were discussed and reinterpreted.
The book offers a cultural, historical and literary study of dream narration in Chinese literature (particularly in the literary genres of xiaoshuo 小說, "petty talk" and biji 筆記, "notebook"). It considers texts from Late Imperial China (13th–19th centuries), with an emphasis on the early/mid-Qing dynasty.
The fundamental characteristics of Japanese narrative texts written between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries can be defined using the categories voice, perspective, and distance. This volume critically reviews existing theories to build the methodological foundation for narratological research into this literature. This theory of Japanese narrative thus makes a contribution to both narratology and Japanese studies.
This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.
Which relationship should, must, or can creation in language (fiction) have to creation outside of language (reality)? How do theoretical notions of literary art change when reality drastically changes? This volume investigates these questions in relation to the literature and social history of Japan from 1850 to 1890.
What did Old Chinese prose sound like? Supported by digital texts, modern technologies and historical linguistics, Chinese Euphonics is a deep dive into the types of sound patterns that occur throughout the earliest corpora of narrative texts in the Chinese canon: the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Classic of Documents《尚書》, the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左傳》and the Discourses of the States《國語》.
Tharsen demonstrates how sound patterns in the speeches preserved in these foundational texts functioned in concert with form and meaning to create a "phonorhetoric," a tactic employed by some of the most eminent figures from Chinese antiquity to beautify and strengthen their arguments and ideas by making use of extensive phonological patterning and the power of sound.
Containing both a broad history of the study of prose rhyming and a wealth of new evidence, Chinese Euphonics lays the groundwork for a new and more comprehensive approach to the study of early Chinese texts.
The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition (trad. dated to the 4th cent. B.C.) mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language.
The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds.
This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”.
For the first time this study presents and analyzes the early work of the major Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909–1995). After introducing the contexts in which his thought arose, the book presents aspects of his work on logic, including his ideas on the relationship between logic, perception, and knowledge. The insightful character of Mou’s texts make the book worthwhile reading.
This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.
Based on a discourse analysis of representative debates between 1920 and 1970 and applying Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field, this study describes the emergence, role, and self-understanding of the modern Japanese intellectual during the inter-war and post-war periods of the 20th century and creates a portrait of the writer as an intellectual.
This thesis is a direct contribution in the field history of thoughts in Late Imperial China, and it adds insight about the reception of tradition in the first half of the 20th century, in particular Confucianism. It explores the criticism of one school (the orthodox daoxue-Confucianism) against another (hanxue-Confucianism) by studying one object of criticism in particular. The author of the criticism, Fang Dongshu (1772-1851), attacks Dai Zhen (1723-1777). Hitherto, research in the 20th century had celebrated Dai Zhen and the scholars of his school of thought/method as precursors to scientific thinking in pre-modern China. Similarly the orthodox schools were set aside as opponents to modernization of society and philosophy. Through the thorough study of arguments made on both sides, this thesis suggests a different understanding, because scholars that lived in a Confucian society had different requirements about Confucian teachings and their impact.Considering the points Fang Dongshu points out about his adversaries contributes to a historically more accurate understanding of the history of Chinese philosophy before the Opium Wars and the end of the Imperial Age.
Mencius was a major political thinker in ancient China, a successor of Confucius and high-ranking advisor to the powerful princes of Qi. His work remains highly significant to this day in Chinese intellectual history. This book offers a comprehensive presentation of Mencius’s life and times, a translation of his work with detailed commentary, and appendices on chronology, history, and key terms.