Zuos Annals Zuo Zhuan

Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan; sometimes called The Zuo Commentary) is China's first great work of history. It consists of two interwoven texts - the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu, a terse annalistic record) and a vast web of narratives and speeches that add context and interpretation to the Annals. Completed by about 300 BCE, it is the longest and one of the most difficult texts surviving from pre-imperial times. It has been as important to the foundation and preservation of Chinese culture as the historical books of the Hebrew Bible have been to the Jewish and Christian traditions. It has shaped notions of history, justice, and the significance of human action in the Chinese tradition perhaps more so than any comparable work of Latin or Greek historiography has done to Western civilization. This translation of Volume Two, accompanied by the original text, an introduction, and annotations, will finally make Zuozhuan accessible to all.

This study examines the topos of peace in Ephesians by comparison with Colossians, Dio Chrysostom’s Orations, and the Confucian Four Books; and shows that Ephesians can be read as a politico-religious letter “concerning peace” within the church.

A vivid chronicle of events in the feudal states of China between 722 and 468 B.C., the Tso Chuan has long been considered both a major historical document and and an influential literary model. Covering over 250 years, these historical narratives focus not only on the political, diplomatic, and military affairs of ancient China, but also on its economic and cultural developments during the turbulent era when warring feudal states were gradually working towards unification. Ending shortly after Confucius' death in 479 B.C., the Tso Chuan provides a background to the life and thought of Confucius and his followers that is available in no other work.

This provocative book explores the ideology of truth and deception in China, offering a nuanced perspective on social interaction in different cultural settings. Drawing on decades of fieldwork in China, Susan D. Blum examines rules, expectations, and beliefs regarding lying and honesty. She argues that public lying is evaluated within Chinese society by culturally specific moral values. Chinese, for example, might emphasize the consequences of speech, Americans the absolute truthfulness. But many Americans also excel in manipulation of language, yet find a simultaneous moral absolutism opposed to lying in any form. Blum considers Japanese and Jewish traditions as well, which similarly struggle to control the boundaries of honesty.

Investigating the historical tradition of Chinese architectural writing from antiquity to the twelfth century, Chinese Architecture and Metaphor reveals significant and fascinating social and cultural phenomena in the most important primary text for the study of the Chinese building tradition. Unlike previous scholarship, which has reviewed this imperially commissioned architectural manual largely as a technical work, this volume considers the Yingzao fashi’s unique literary value and explores the rich cultural implications in and behind its technical content. Utilizing a philological approach, the author pays particular attention to the traditional and contemporary architectural terminology presented in the Yingzao fashi. In examining the semantic meaning of the architectural terms used in the manual, he uncovers a systematic architectural metaphor wherein bracketing elements are likened to flowers, flowering branches, and foliage: Thus pillars with bracketing above are compared to blossoming trees. More importantly, this intriguing imagery was shared by different social groups, in particular craftsmen and literati, and craftsmen themselves employed literary knowledge in naming architectural elements. Relating these phenomena to the unprecedented flourishing of literature, the literati’s greater admiration of technical knowledge, and the higher intellectual capacity of craftsmen during the Song, Architecture and Metaphor demonstrates how the learned and “unlearned” cultures entangled in the construction of architectural knowledge in premodern China. It convincingly shows that technical language served as a faithful carrier of contemporary popular culture and aesthetic concepts. Chinese Architecture and Metaphor demonstrates a high level of engagement with a broad spectrum of sophisticated Chinese sources. It will become a classic work for all students and scholars of East Asian architecture.

In The Culture of Love in China and Europe Paolo Santangelo and Gábor Boros offer a survey of the cults of love developed in the history of ideas and literary production in China and Europe between the 12th and early 19th century. They describe parallel evolutions within the two cultures, and how innovatively these independent civilisations developed their own categories and myths to explain, exalt but also control the emotions of love and their behavioural expressions. The analyses contain rich materials for comparison, point out the universal and specific elements in each culture, and hint at differences and resemblances, without ignoring the peculiar beauty and attractive force of the texts cultivating love.

Modality is a grammatical, or semantic-grammatical, category. It is an important component of human languages. This is at least the case in most European languages. To what extent is it a near-universal? This thesis is to contribute to the question. It focuses on modal verbs in English and Chinese, two genetically and geographically unrelated languages, and analyzes what these two languages have in common and how they differ in their systems of modality. To achieve the aim, the thesis adopts the theoretical framework proposed by van der Auwera (1996, 1998 with Plungian, 2001) for the typological study of modality. Its language-specific descriptions involve the morphosyntactic features, notional functions, modal logic, and diachronic development. With these descriptions, it constructs a cross-linguistic database in a uniform, parallel structure. Then on the basis of this database, it deals with the cross-linguistic issues about modality in English and Chinese. Like many of the studies in this area, this research makes use of the well-sampled data in the relevant literature, thereby assuring the same degree of representativeness. When the data do not meet this need, it resorts to computer-based corpora. In the diachronic study of Chinese modality, quantitative analysis is adopted in proposing a development path for the senses of a modal. English translation is given particular attention in the description of Chinese modality and cross-linguistic analyses. One can only know one's own language only if one compares it with other languages. The present study is conducive to a better understanding of English and Chinese. It contributes not only to the investigation of language universals, but also to the study of human cognition and other linguistic or applied linguistic issues.