Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths.
In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the fourth century BCE among the followers of Confucius.
In Performing Enlightenment, Mengxiao Wang argues that the late Ming and early Qing Buddhists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resolved their conflict between religion and worldly entertainment by transforming playwriting, stage performance, and theatergoing into a creative mode of devotional practice.
The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for government appointments, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic. Lawrence Zhang's groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence contradicts this widely held assessment.
This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch’ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature as well as theorists and scholars of other languages.
How does emotion shape public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. Covering forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars, Tu analyzes how liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies.
In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan's engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period, including large-scale analyses of the record of the circulation of Chinese texts in Japan. He also traces the hidden history of Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio) in Japan.
This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)-commonly called the Tokyo trial-established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II.