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Author: Stephen Durrant Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295806389 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China’s earliest and best-known historian, and his “Letter to Ren An” is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish his life’s work, the first comprehensive history of China, instead of honorably committing suicide following his castration for “deceiving the emperor.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some scholars have queried the authenticity of the letter. Is it a genuine piece of writing by Sima Qian or an early work of literary impersonation? The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy provides a full translation of the letter and uses different methods to explore issues in textual history. It also shows how ideas about friendship, loyalty, factionalism, and authorship encoded in the letter have far-reaching implications for the study of China.
Author: Stephen Durrant Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295806389 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China’s earliest and best-known historian, and his “Letter to Ren An” is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish his life’s work, the first comprehensive history of China, instead of honorably committing suicide following his castration for “deceiving the emperor.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some scholars have queried the authenticity of the letter. Is it a genuine piece of writing by Sima Qian or an early work of literary impersonation? The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy provides a full translation of the letter and uses different methods to explore issues in textual history. It also shows how ideas about friendship, loyalty, factionalism, and authorship encoded in the letter have far-reaching implications for the study of China.
Author: Grant Hardy Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 9780231504515 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Sima Qian (c. 100 B.C.E.) was China's first historian—he was known as Grand Astrologer at the court of Emperor Wu during the Han dynasty—and, along with Confucius and the First Emperor of Qin, was one of the creators of imperial China. His Shiji (published for Columbia in a translation by Burton Watson as Records of the Grand Historian) not only became the model for the twenty-six Standard Histories that the historians of each Chinese dynasty wrote to legitimize the dynastic succession, but also has been an enormously influential resource to historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and many others seeking an understanding of early Chinese history. In Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, Grant Hardy presents convincing evidence that the Shiji is quite unlike such Western counterparts as the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, for, Hardy argues, Sima Qian's work seeks not only to represent but to influence the world in a manner based on Confucian concepts of sageliness and "the rectification of names." Although many scholars have sought close parallels between Sima Qian and the Greek historians—either criticizing Sima's work, as if Western models of historical interpretation could serve as a template by which to read it, or overemphasizing his "objectivity" to more closely align his text with these "respectable" Greek models—Hardy boldly contends that the Chinese historian never intended to produce a consistent, closed interpretation of the past. Instead, Hardy argues, the Shiji is a microcosm in which Sima Qian sought to represent the open-endedness and multivalence of the world around him, revealing and reinforcing the natural order. In mapping out this model of the world, Sima embodies the historian as sage rather than chronicler. Transcending mere accuracy in recording events, such a historian seeks not to present an opinion about what happened in the past, buttressed with rational arguments and pertinent evidence, but to penetrate the outer details of an incident and discover the moral truths it embodies. Thus intuiting the moral significance of events, the sage-historian delineates the Way and offers his readers a chance to become more in tune with the natural order. Illustrating his provocative theses about the Shiji by analyzing Sima Qian's handling of specific historical personages and episodes such as the First Emperor of the Qin, the hereditary house of Confucius, and the conflicts that ended with the founding of the Han dynasty, Hardy both extends and challenges existing interpretations of this crucial yet understudied text and sheds light on its puzzles and incongruities.
Author: Thomas R. Martin Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education ISBN: 1319242871 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 162
Book Description
In this accessible volume, Thomas R. Martin compares the writings of Herodotus in ancient Greece with those of Sima Qian in ancient China to demonstrate the hallmarks of early history writing. While these authors lived in different centuries and were not aware of each other’s works, Martin shows the similar struggles that each grappled with in preparing their historical accounts and how their efforts helped invent modern notions of history writing and the job of the historian. The introduction’s cross-cultural analysis includes a biography of each author, illustrating the setting and times in which he worked, as well as a discussion of how each man introduced interpretation and moral judgment into his writing. The accompanying documents include excerpts from Herodotus’ The Histories and Sima Qian’s Shiji, which illustrate their approach to history writing and their understanding of their own cultures. Also featured are maps and illustrations, a chronology, questions to consider, and a selected bibliography.
Author: Esther S. Klein Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004376879 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
In Father of Chinese History, Esther Klein explores the life and work of the great Han dynasty historian Sima Qian as seen by readers from the Han to the Song dynasties. Today Sima Qian is viewed as both a tragic hero and a literary genius. Premodern responses to him were more equivocal: the complex personal emotions he expressed prompted readers to worry about whether his work as a historian was morally or politically acceptable. Klein demonstrates how controversies over the value and meaning of Sima Qian’s work are intimately bound up with larger questions: How should history be written? What role does individual experience and self-expression play within that process? By what standards can the historian’s choices be judged?
Author: Victor H. Mair Publisher: Latitude 20 ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 764
Book Description
The Hawai‘i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture is a collection of more than ninety primary sources—all but a few of which were translated specifically for this volume—of cultural significance from the Bronze Age to the turn of the twentieth century. They take into account virtually every aspect of traditional culture, including sources from the non-Sinitic ethnic minorities.
Author: Constance Crompton Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000721833 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
As digital media, tools, and techniques continue to impact and advance the humanities, Doing More Digital Humanities provides practical information on how to do digital humanities work. This book offers: A comprehensive, practical guide to the digital humanities. Accessible introductions, which in turn provide the grounding for the more advanced chapters within the book. An overview of core competencies, to help research teams, administrators, and allied groups, make informed decisions about suitable collaborators, skills development, and workflow. Guidance for individuals, collaborative teams, and academic managers who support digital humanities researchers. Contextualized case studies, including examples of projects, tools, centres, labs, and research clusters. Resources for starting digital humanities projects, including links to further readings, training materials and exercises, and resources beyond. Additional augmented content that complements the guidance and case studies in Doing Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2016).
Author: Dan Edelstein Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022670601X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
Author: Filippo Marsili Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 1438472013 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 346
Book Description
Offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires. Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of Chinas early empires (221 BCE9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Romes empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (14187 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsilire interprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of religion before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the sacred to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities. Heaven Is Empty is a tour de force. It reveals Marsilis bold vision of early Chinese religion and his deft use of critical theory. The book will inspire scholars of early China for generations to come. Miranda Brown, author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China and The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive
Author: Robinson Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197666043 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
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 authority around themselves. Both rulers incorporated new men from outside of the established court elite to serve in their religious institutions and as advisors, thus weakening the authority of those who had traditionally held it. They both expanded the reach of their imperially-sponsored cult, and refashioned important ceremonies to demonstrate and communicate the unprecedented achievements of each ruler. Emperor Wu recruited experts in mantic knowledge from far reaches of the empire, while Augustus co-opted loyal followers into the newly revived priestly colleges. Robinson shows how the rulers used their respective religious institutions to consolidate their authority, secure support, and communicate their authority to the elite and commoners alike. By using the comparative approach, the author not only reveals similar trends in the formation of ancient empires, but also shows how new perspectives on familiar material can be found when engaging with other societies.
Author: Stephen Durrant
Author: Stephen Durrant
Author: Grant Hardy
Author: Sima Qian
Author: Thomas R. Martin
Author: Esther S. Klein
Author: Victor H. Mair
Author: Constance Crompton
Author: Dan Edelstein
Author: Filippo Marsili
Author: Robinson