Reviews for Tao Qian and the Chinese Poetic Tradition: The Quest for Cultural Identity

The average rating for Tao Qian and the Chinese Poetic Tradition: The Quest for Cultural Identity based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-15 00:00:00 Jamie Tennant "Invented as an ideal by small bands of scholars, expanded into a detailed program in encyclopedic texts and commentaries, the Chinese empire survived 2,000 years of dynastic rise and fall as a dream preserved first in a body of texts and ultimately in theatrical performances. Now only the texts and theater remain." Take a handful of small, peripheral, warring states in an ancient land. Circulate among them itinerant poets and moralists and teachers with a memory of a glorious past, upon which they draw in their meditations and frequently critical discussions of the chaotic present. Gather these writings into a canon which serves to legitimize the political unification of the region and lend authority to the new social hierarchy that comes with it. Watch the kingdom of words upon which the dynasties rise and fall, together with the status of the scholars who master them, persist for thousands of years. What I found thrilling about this book - and it's a big, heavy, workmanlike, often plodding tome - is that so much of what was being described was evocative of other moments of cultural consolidation around a key corpus of texts at about the same time. Think Judea and the composition of the Bible in the 7th century, or Greece and the emergence of philosophy in the 5th. Here we have central China in the 6th through 4th centuries, the age of Confucius, but just as much of a dozen other writers and schools much less well known outside their homeland. In a period of social breakdown - the protracted collapse of the Zhou dynasty running from the 8th to 3rd centuries - characterized by a shifting landscape of contending successors, Chinese literature suddenly lurches forward from divination manuals to some of the earliest and most sophisticated political philosophy of antiquity. With the unification of China under the Qin and later Han Dynasties, this literary and philosophical harvest of culture (or one version of it, the Confucian variety) became the ideological foundation for the following 2,000 years of imperial government. Lewis's main argument links all of this to the technology of writing, arguing that, contrary to arguments along the lines of Jack Goody that prioritize its function as a prosthetic of human memory and information storage, it was much more crucial as a tool in cementing an imagined community capable of enduring across great reaches of space and across great variations in culture and circumstance. The role of intellectuals in the Warring States Period, following the decline of the Zhou and preceding the rise of the Qin and Han, was to make the bridge between the ancient use of script as a form of communication with the gods, and the mastery of script as a sign of fitness for rule over men. As in ancient Judea with Hebrew, a script the very form of which was felt to hold divine significance became the basis for a model of earthly virtue and universal order that far transcended its provincial origins.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-08 00:00:00 Martin Diez Took me 4 or so months to work my way through, but definitely worth it. Would read again.