[PDF] Chinese Sympathies eBook

Author : Daniel Leonhard Purdy
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 24,15 MB
Release : 2021-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501759752

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Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe. Analyzing key German literary texts—theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cycles—Chinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe's concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful similarities across culturally diverse literatures based on shared human experiences. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Author : Daniel Leonhard Purdy
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 27,19 MB
Release : 2021-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501759760

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Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe. Analyzing key German literary texts—theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cycles—Chinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe's concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful similarities across culturally diverse literatures based on shared human experiences. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Author : Eric Hayot Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Asian Studies Pennsylvania State University
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 26,60 MB
Release : 2009-03-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0199700117

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Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? What can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China? And what does it tell us about the philosophy of modernity? The Hypothetical Mandarin is, in some sense, a history of the Western imagination. It is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, of globalization, of human rights, and of the idea of the modern. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on accounts of torture, on medical case studies, travelers tales, photographs, plasticized corpses, polemical broadsides, watercolors, and on oil paintings. His analyses show that the historical connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China," and why the story of the West's Chinese pain goes to the heart of the relation between language and the body and the social experience of the modern human being. Written in an ebullient prose, The Hypothetical Mandarin demonstrates how the network that intertwines China, sympathy, and modernity continues to shape the economic and human experience.

Author : Eric Hayot
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 36,15 MB
Release : 2009-04-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0199888574

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Through readings of novels, medical case studies, travelers' reports, photographs, and paintings, The Hypothetical Mandarin shows that in the West the connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China." Eric Hayot, through keen interpretations of myriad art forms and nonfictional writings, reveals how Western responses to Chinese pain go to the heart of the relationship between language and the body, the social and philosophical experience of modernity, and the definition of a universal human subject. In short, this analysis reveals how four terms--sympathy, suffering, economic exchange, and representational exchange--establish the network that frames the historical discourse on China, sympathy, and modernity. It is a book that opens new possibilities for thinking about the West's relationship to China, past and present, and that establishes a new philosophical vantage from which to consider the question of empathy.

Author : Andrew T. Kaiser
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 41,14 MB
Release : 2019-03-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 153266415X

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Welsh Baptist missionary to China Timothy Richard (1845-1919) was once widely regarded as "one of the greatest missionaries whom any branch of the Church, whether Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, or Protestant, has sent to China." Today, few have heard of Richard and his remarkable lifetime of ministry in China. As the first critical examination of Richard's missionary identity, this groundbreaking historical study traces the narrative of Richard's early life in Wales and his formative first two decades of service in China. Richard's adaptations to the common evangelistic techniques of his day, his interest in learning from grassroots Chinese sectarian religions, his integration of evangelism and famine relief during the North China Famine (1876-79), his strategic decision to evangelize Chinese elites, and his complicated relationships with Hudson Taylor and other China missionaries are all explored through the writings and personal letters of Richard and his contemporaries. The resulting portrait represents a significant revision to existing interpretations of this influential China missionary, emphasizing his deep empathy for the people of China and his abiding evangelical identity. Readable and relevant, Encountering China provides a new generation with an introduction to this lost legend of China mission.