Keywords in Chinese Culture

Wai?yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her books include The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (2007), Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (2014) and Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs about Courtesans (2020).Yuri Pines is Michael W. Lipson Professor of Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His monographs include Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (2009); The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy (2012); and The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China (2017).

“Far more than a handbook or reference, Keywords in Chinese Culture is a master class in literary and cultural interpretation. The nine concepts the contributors address are in themselves genuinely revelatory of abiding patterns in premodern Chinese culture and its reception, while the individual approaches the writers take to the problem of keyword interpretation add up to a thoroughgoing questioning of the ways in which the past delivers its meaning to new audiences. Every page opens the material in new and fascinating ways. As an introduction to a vast and diverse tradition and as a guide to the arts of reading, this volume is a skeleton key that will delight any scholar.” —David Schaberg, author of A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography“The basic conceptual schemes of classical Chinese that define the underlying cognitive framework of Chinese intellectual history are explored in this book in the most promising way: important case studies of systematic conceptual analysis. This book goes to the cognitive roots of Chinese philosophical reflection.” —Christoph Harbsmeier, author of Language and Logic in Traditional China