[PDF] Rewriting Early Chinese Texts eBook

Author : Edward L. Shaughnessy
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 49,91 MB
Release : 2006-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0791482359

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Rewriting Early Chinese Texts examines the problems of reconstituting and editing ancient manuscripts that will revise—indeed "rewrite"—Chinese history. It is now generally recognized that the extensive archaeological discoveries made in China over the last three decades necessitate such a rewriting and will keep an army of scholars busy for years to come. However, this is by no means the first time China's historical record has needed rewriting. In this book, author Edward L. Shaughnessy explores the issues involved in editing manuscripts, rewriting them, both today and in the past. The book begins with a discussion of the difficulties encountered by modern archaeologists and paleographers working with manuscripts discovered in ancient tombs. The challenges are considerable: these texts are usually written in archaic script on bamboo strips and are typically fragmentary and in disarray. It is not surprising that their new editions often meet with criticism from other scholars. Shaughnessy then moves back in time to consider efforts to reconstitute similar bamboo-strip manuscripts found in the late third century in a tomb in Jixian, Henan. He shows that editors at the time encountered many of the same difficulties faced by modern archaeologists and paleographers, and that the first editions produced by a court-appointed team of editors quickly prompted criticism from other scholars of the time. Shaughnessy concludes with a detailed study of the editing of one of these texts, the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian), arguably the most important manuscript ever discovered in China. Showing how at least two different, competing editions of this text were produced by different editors, and how the differences between them led later scholars to regard the original edition—the only one still extant—as a forgery, Shaughnessy argues for this text's place in the rewriting of early Chinese history.

Author : Edward L. Shaughnessy
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 11,64 MB
Release : 2023-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1438495234

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Archaeological discoveries over the past one hundred years have resulted in repeated calls to "rewrite ancient Chinese history." This is especially true of documents written on oracle bones, bronze vessels, and bamboo strips. In Writing Early China, Edward L. Shaughnessy surveys all of these types of documents and considers what they reveal about the creation and transmission of knowledge in ancient China. Opposed to the common view that most knowledge was transmitted orally in ancient China, Shaughnessy demonstrates that by no later than the tenth century BCE scribes were writing lengthy texts like portions of the Chinese classics, and that by the fourth century BCE the primary mode of textual transmission was by way of visual copying from one manuscript to another.

Author : Hanmo Zhang
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 19,93 MB
Release : 2018-10-08
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 150150519X

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This book is a timely response to a rather urgent call to seek an updated methodology in rereading and reappraising early Chinese texts in light of newly discovered early writings. For a long time, the concept of authorship in the formation and transmission of early Chinese texts has been misunderstood. The nominal author who should mainly function as a guide to text formation and interpretation is considered retrospectively as the originator and writer of the text. This book illustrates that although some notions about the text as the author’s property began to appear in some Eastern Han texts, a strict correlation between the author and the text results from later conceptions of literary history. Before the modern era, there existed a conceptual gap between an author and a writer. A pre-modern Chinese text could have had both an author and a writer, or even multiple authors and multiple writers. This work is the first study addressing these issues by more systematically emphasizing the connection of the text, the author, and the religious and sociopolitical settings in which these issues were embedded. It is expected to constitute a palpable contribution to Chinese studies and the discipline of philology in general

Author : Edward L. Shaughnessy
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 38,45 MB
Release : 2014-04-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0231533306

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In recent years, three ancient manuscripts relating to the Yi jing (I Ching), or Classic of Changes, have been discovered. The earliest—the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi—dates to about 300 B.C.E. and shows evidence of the text's original circulation. The Guicang, or Returning to Be Stored, reflects another ancient Chinese divination tradition based on hexagrams similar to those of the Yi jing. In 1993, two manuscripts were found in a third-century B.C.E. tomb at Wangjiatai that contain almost exact parallels to the Guicang's early quotations, supplying new information on the performance of early Chinese divination. Finally, the Fuyang Zhou Yi was excavated from the tomb of Xia Hou Zao, lord of Ruyin, who died in 165 B.C.E. Each line of this classic is followed by one or more generic prognostications similar to phrases found in the Yi jing, indicating exciting new ways the text was produced and used in the interpretation of divinations. Unearthing the Changes details the discovery and significance of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Guicang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi, including full translations of the texts and additional evidence constructing a new narrative of the Yi jing's writing and transmission in the first millennium B.C.E. An introduction situates the role of archaeology in the modern attempt to understand the Classic of Changes. By showing how the text emerged out of a popular tradition of divination, these newly unearthed manuscripts reveal an important religious dimension to its evolution.

Author : Pauline Yu
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 36,27 MB
Release : 2000-09-19
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780520224667

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This is an interdisciplinary collection of articles analyzing seven classic premodern Chinese texts that are provided in translation.

Author : Matthias L. Richter
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 24,23 MB
Release : 2013-01-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 900424381X

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In The Embodied Text Matthias L. Richter offers an exemplary study of a 300 BCE Chinese manuscript, exploring significant differences between the Warring States manuscript text and its transmitted early imperial counterparts. These differences reveal the adaptation of the text to a changed political environment as well as general ideological developments. This study further demonstrates how the physical embodiment of the text in the manuscript reflects modes of textual formation and social uses of written texts.

Author : Robert Ford Campany
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 11,21 MB
Release : 2022-03-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1684176425

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Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.

Author : William D Fleming
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 26,8 MB
Release : 2023-08-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1684176875

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In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan's engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600-1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record--the first of their kind--document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices--the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding--in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting--hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation--that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.

Author : Edward L. Shaughnessy
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 33,33 MB
Release : 1997-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780791433775

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Examines the original composition of China's oldest books, the Classic of Changes, the Venerated Documents, and the Classic of Poetry, and attempts to restore their original meanings.