Writing And Authority In Early China

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Writing and Authority in Early China

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 556 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 1999-03-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438410746

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Writing and Authority in Early China by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

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.

Writing and Authority in Early China

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 1999-03-18
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0791441148

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Writing and Authority in Early China by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

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.

Writing and Literacy in Early China

Author : Feng Li,David Prager Branner
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2012-05-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780295804507

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Writing and Literacy in Early China by Feng Li,David Prager Branner Pdf

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.

The Construction of Space in Early China

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780791482490

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The Construction of Space in Early China by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.

ART MYTH AND RITUAL P

Author : Kwang-chih CHANG,Kwang-chih Chang
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780674029408

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ART MYTH AND RITUAL P by Kwang-chih CHANG,Kwang-chih Chang Pdf

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.

The Flood Myths of Early China

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780791482223

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The Flood Myths of Early China by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

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.

Writing and the Ancient State

Author : Haicheng Wang
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 435 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2014-05-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107028128

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Writing and the Ancient State by Haicheng Wang Pdf

Writing and the Ancient State is a comparative study of the use of writing to create and maintain order in early states.

The Empire of the Text

Author : Christopher Leigh Connery
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 0847687392

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The Empire of the Text by Christopher Leigh Connery Pdf

This unique study argues that in the Qin-Han period, there arose in China a regime of textual authority_one that overlapped but did not coincide with imperial authority. Drawing on a wide range of research and theory, Connery makes an original contribution to the analysis of early imperial elite culture, particularly in the fields of literature and linguistics, intellectual, and institutional history. The author provides new contexts for thinking about canonization and textual transmission systems, an innovative framework for analysis and discussion of the early imperial elite, a socio-ideological exploration of one strand of late Han 'Confucian' thought, and a critique of the concepts of subjectivity and the 'birth of lyricism' in China.

Early China

Author : Li Feng
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2013-12-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521895521

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Early China by Li Feng Pdf

A critical new interpretation of the early history of Chinese civilization based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China

Author : Feng Li
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2008-12-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521884471

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Bureaucracy and the State in Early China by Feng Li Pdf

This ook redefines the bureaucracy of Ancient Chinese society during the Western Zhou period. The analysis is based on inscriptions of royal edicts from the period carved into bronze vessels. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority.

Social Memory and State Formation in Early China

Author : Min Li
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 587 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2018-05-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107141452

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Social Memory and State Formation in Early China by Min Li Pdf

A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.

Sanctioned Violence in Early China

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1990-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 079140076X

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Sanctioned Violence in Early China by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

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.

Writing Early China

Author : Edward L. Shaughnessy
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2023-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438495231

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Writing Early China by Edward L. Shaughnessy Pdf

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.

Ways with Words

Author : Pauline Yu
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2000-09-19
Category : Education
ISBN : 0520224663

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Ways with Words by Pauline Yu Pdf

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

The Cloudy Mirror

Author : Stephen W. Durrant
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1995-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0791426556

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The Cloudy Mirror by Stephen W. Durrant Pdf

Sima Qian's writings have influenced the Chinese for over 2,000 years and still serve as a fiscal source of historical information about China.