Donald Holzman – författare

Poetry and Politics is the first full-length study in any language of the life and works of the Chinese poet and thinker, Juan Chi (AD 210-263). This book contains translations of all Juan Chi's important works, in verse and prose, his letters and all the historical accounts of his life. The reader is thus enabled, for the first time in a work of this kind, to see a Chinese writer in the round, in his works and in his setting. Juan Chi's attachment to traditional Confucian values kept him in the centre of political and social life, but eventually his disgust with the disloyalty and self-seeking he saw in Wei society made him turn away. He attempted in Taoism and in the pursuit of Taoist immortality to find the purity and permanence so lacking in the world, but without an ultimate commitment. Juan Chi was accused both in his lifetime and subsequently of being a Confucian hero and a Taoist iconoclast, and in him can be seen the contradictory intellectual and religious forces t hat were slowly bringing in the Chinese Middle Ages.

This reference guide covers the entire history of Japan and is limited to books dealing with the doctrines and histories of the religions of Japan. It includes all works concerning religious, ethical, moral, and, to some extent, even political and educational thinkers and movements.

This volume aims to account for the tremendous changes in the attitudes towards the world and towards themselves that can be seen in the works of Chinese writers in the early centuries of the Christian era. How do the massive conversion of such a large part of the population to Buddhism and the widespread development of the Daoist religion correspond to the conversion of the West to Christianity? Does this conversion to new religions that were replacing the ancient imperial religions represent similar developments on the eastern and western fringes of the Old World? Can we speak with any confidence of the gradual evolution of China from an 'Antiquity' to a 'Middle Ages'? The author attempts to show that, in their attitudes towards literature and their appreciation of landscape, during the Han and the first four centuries of the Christian era, we can see signs of a turning inward and the birth of new forms of spirituality akin to those that arose in the West during the same period.

First published in 1998, the papers in this second volume by Donald Holzman are concerned with the themes of religion and poetry and song in early medieval China. Religion is to the fore in the first two sections, dealing with Daoist immortals and their cult, as reflected in poetic works of the first three centuries ad, with songs used in religious ceremonies, and with the origins and history of the cold food festival. The last group of articles includes a major study of the poems of Ji Kang (223-262) as well as other poetry of the 4th-5th centuries, and an analysis of the changing image of the merchant from the 4th to the 9th centuries.