Writing And Authority In Early China

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438410743
Total Pages : 556 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing and Authority in Early China written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-03-18 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs became potent objects. Writing and Authority in Early China traces the enterprise of creating a parallel reality within texts that depicted the entire world. These texts provided models for the invention of a world empire, and one version ultimately became the first state canon of imperial China. This canon served to perpetuate the dream and the reality of the imperial system across the centuries.

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791441145
Total Pages : 560 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing and Authority in Early China written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-03-18 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose master generated power and whose graphs became potent objects.

Author : Kwang-chih CHANG
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674029402
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book ART MYTH AND RITUAL P written by Kwang-chih CHANG and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading scholar in the United States on Chinese archaeology challenges long-standing conceptions of the rise of political authority in ancient China. Questioning Marx's concept of an "Asiatic" mode of production, Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis," and cultural-materialist theories on the importance of technology, K. C. Chang builds an impressive counterargument, one which ranges widely from recent archaeological discoveries to studies of mythology, ancient Chinese poetry, and the iconography of Shang food vessels.

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791482499
Total Pages : 514 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Construction of Space in Early China written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how the emerging Chinese empire purposely reconceived but was also constrained by basic spatial units such as the body, the household, the region, and the world.

Author : Haicheng Wang
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107028124
Total Pages : 435 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing and the Ancient State written by Haicheng Wang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing and the Ancient State is a comparative study of the use of writing to create and maintain order in early states.

Author : Feng Li
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295804505
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing and Literacy in Early China written by Feng Li and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence and spread of literacy in ancient human society an important topic for all who study the ancient world, and the development of written Chinese is of particular interest, as modern Chinese orthography preserves logographic principles shared by its most ancient forms, making it unique among all present-day writing systems. In the past three decades, the discovery of previously unknown texts dating to the third century BCE and earlier, as well as older versions of known texts, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese writing. The long-term continuity and stability of the Chinese written language allow for this detailed study of the role literacy played in early civilization. The contributors to Writing and Literacy in Early China inquire into modes of manuscript production, the purposes for which texts were produced, and the ways in which they were actually used. By carefully evaluating current evidence and offering groundbreaking new interpretations, the book illuminates the nature of literacy for scribes and readers.

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791482227
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Flood Myths of Early China written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how the flood myths of early China provided a template for that society’s major social and political institutions. Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire. Mark Edward Lewis is Kwoh-ting Li Professor of Chinese Culture at Stanford University and the author of Writing and Authority in Early China and The Construction of Space in Early China, both published by SUNY Press.

Author : Xing Lu
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643362909
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B.C.E written by Xing Lu and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xing Lu examines language, art, persuasion, and argumentation in ancient China and offers a detailed and authentic account of ancient Chinese rhetorical theories and practices within the society's philosophical, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts. She focuses on the works of five schools of thought and ten well-known Chinese thinkers from Confucius to Han Feizi to the the Later Mohists. Lu identifies seven key Chinese terms pertaining to speech, language, persuasion, and argumentation as they appeared in these original texts, selecting ming bian as the linchpin for the Chinese conceptual term of rhetorical studies. Lu compares Chinese rhetorical perspectives with those of the ancient Greeks, illustrating that the Greeks and the Chinese shared a view of rhetoric as an ethical enterprise and of speech as a rational and psychological activity. The two traditions differed, however, in their rhetorical education, sense of rationality, perceptions of the role of language, approach to the treatment and study of rhetoric, and expression of emotions. Lu also links ancient Chinese rhetorical perspectives with contemporary Chinese interpersonal and political communication behavior and offers suggestions for a multicultural rhetoric that recognizes both culturally specific and transcultural elements of human communication.

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791400760
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.6X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sanctioned Violence in Early China written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides new insight into the creation of the Chinese empire by examining the changing forms of permitted violence--warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the basic units of social organization, and in the fundamental commitments of the ruling elite. The work offers a new interpretation of the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state controlled by a supreme autocrat and his agents. In addition, it shows how a new pattern of violence was rationalized and how the Chinese of the period incorporated their ideas about violence into the myths and proto-scientific theories that provided historical and natural prototypes for the imperial state.

Author : Pauline Yu
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520224667
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ways with Words written by Pauline Yu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-09-19 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an interdisciplinary collection of articles analyzing seven classic premodern Chinese texts that are provided in translation.