"Information" has become a core concept across the disciplines, yet it is still often seen as a unique feature of the Western world or the digital age. Leading experts turn to China's textual ...tradition to show the significance of information for reconceptualizing the work of literary history, from its beginnings to the present moment.
At once a revered canon associated with Confucius and the earliest anthology of poetry, the Book of Poems holds a unique place in Chinese literary history. Since early imperial times it served as an ...ideal of literary perfection, as it provided a basis for defining shi poetry, the most esteemed genre of elite composition. In imperial China, however, literary criticism and classical learning represented distinct fields of inquiry that differed in status, with classical learning considered more serious and prestigious. Literary critics thus highlighted connections between the Book of Poems and later verse, while classical scholars obscured the origins of their ideas in literary theory. This book explores the mutual influence of literary and classicizing approaches, which frequently and fruitfully borrowed from one another. Drawing on a wide range of sources including commentaries, anthologies, colophons, and inscriptions, Bruce Rusk chronicles how scholars borrowed from critics without attribution and even resorted to forgery to make appealing new ideas look old. By unraveling the relationships through which classical and literary scholarship on the Book of Poems co-evolved from the Han dynasty through the Qing, this study shows that the ancient classic was the catalyst for intellectual innovation and literary invention.
The book of swindles Zhang, Yingyu; Rea, Christopher G; Rusk, Bruce
2017, 20170905
eBook
This is an age of deception. Con men ply the roadways. Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three. Devious nuns entice young women into adultery. Sorcerers use charmed talismans ...for mind control and murder. A pair of dubious monks extorts money from a powerful official and then spends it on whoring. A rich student tries to bribe the chief examiner, only to hand his money to an imposter. A eunuch kidnaps boys and consumes their "essence" in an attempt to regrow his penis. These are just a few of the entertaining and surprising tales to be found in this seventeenth-century work, said to be the earliest Chinese collection of swindle stories.The Book of Swindles, compiled by an obscure writer from southern China, presents a fascinating tableau of criminal ingenuity. The flourishing economy of the late Ming period created overnight fortunes for merchants-and gave rise to a host of smooth operators, charlatans, forgers, and imposters seeking to siphon off some of the new wealth.The Book of Swindles, which was ostensibly written as a manual for self-protection in this shifting and unstable world, also offers an expert guide to the art of deception. Each story comes with commentary by the author, Zhang Yingyu, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle. This volume, which contains annotated translations of just over half of the eighty-odd stories in Zhang's original collection, provides a wealth of detail on social life during the late Ming and offers words of warning for a world in peril.
This is an age of deception. Con men ply the roadways. Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three. Devious nuns entice young women into adultery. Sorcerers use charmed talismans ...for mind control and murder. A pair of dubious monks extorts money from a powerful official and then spends it on whoring. A rich student tries to bribe the chief examiner, only to hand his money to an imposter. A eunuch kidnaps boys and consumes their essence in an attempt to regrow his penis. These are just a few of the entertaining and surprising tales to be found in this seventeenth-century work, said to be the earliest Chinese collection of swindle stories.The Book of Swindles, compiled by an obscure writer from southern China, presents a fascinating tableau of criminal ingenuity. The flourishing economy of the late Ming period created overnight fortunes for merchants-and gave rise to a host of smooth operators, charlatans, forgers, and imposters seeking to siphon off some of the new wealth. The Book of Swindles, which was ostensibly written as a manual for self-protection in this shifting and unstable world, also offers an expert guide to the art of deception. Each story comes with commentary by the author, Zhang Yingyu, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle. This volume, which contains annotated translations of just over half of the eighty-odd stories in Zhang's original collection, provides a wealth of detail on social life during the late Ming and offers words of warning for a world in peril.
... Tao Qian is vaguely qualified as the ancestor of a whole class not mentioned elsewhere in Shipin: no other poet is listed as a descendant of Tao or labeled a recluse. ... I have argued that the ...line in question fits poorly with the rhetorical and syntactic structure of Shipin and frames Tao Qian within literary history in a manner atypical of the rest of the work and using anachronistic language.
Li Jingyi’s marking offu, bi, andxingin his own poems was a bold choice, for any writer employing these terms did so cognizant of their origin in the Six Principles of theBook of Poems. Although he ...was among the first poets to label his own work in this fashion, by no later than the second century bce critics had begun to use these descriptors for postcanonical verse by others, typically as an indication that the work had captured something of the spirit of the canonical poets. This chapter examines how these three tropes moved out of and
Poems and Poems Rusk, Bruce
Critics and Commentators,
12/2012, Letnik:
81
Book Chapter
The lexical overlap of shi andShitied secular and canonical poetics implicitly, and by writing and commenting on poems, poets and critics could actively forge links between the two. This chapter ...explores some key ways in which writers from the Warring States period through the Song dynasty asserted such homologies. Not all such claims were as weighty or self-conscious as those associated with thefugu復古 (return to antiquity/revival of antiquity) approach that became a literary movement in the Tang (see Chapter 3), but they all necessitated both connections and distinctions between the two categories of verse. The line
