Authorship and Text-making in Early China

Hanmo Zhang

Open Access Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2018

Authorship and Text-making in Early China

Hanmo Zhang
Funded by: Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology

Volume 2 in the series Library of Sinology [LOS]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501505133

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 / Editor information

Zhang Hanmo, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Preface and Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	VII
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	XI
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
1. Text, Author, and the Function of Authorship Open Access Download PDF	10
2. The Author as Cultural Hero: The Yellow Emperor, the Symbolic Author Open Access Download PDF	35
3. The Author as the Head of a Teaching Lineage: Confucius, the Quotable Author Open Access Download PDF	93
4. The Author as a Patron: Prince of Huainan, the Owner-Author Open Access Download PDF	175
5. The Author as an Individual Writer: Sima Qian, the Presented Author Open Access Download PDF	241
Conclusion Open Access Download PDF	306
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	319
Index Open Access Download PDF	347

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: All students of Early China; students of early intellectual history; students of comparative studies of early texts.
Pages
- Front matter: 12
- Main content: 363
Keywords: Yellow Emperor; Confucius; Liu An; Sima Qian.

eBook

Published: October 8, 2018
ISBN: 9781501505133

Hardcover

Published: October 8, 2018
ISBN: 9781501514357