Newell Ann Van Auken – författare

The Spring and Autumn is an annals text composed of brief records covering the period 722–479 BCE and written from the perspective of the ancient Chinese state of Lu. A long neglected part of the Chinese canon, it is traditionally ascribed to Confucius, who is said to have embedded his evaluations of events within the text. However, the formulaic and impersonal records do not resemble the repository of moral judgments that they are alleged to be.Driven by her discovery that the Spring and Autumn is governed by a system of rules, Newell Ann Van Auken argues that Lu record-keepers—not a later editor—produced the formally regular core of the text. She demonstrates that the Spring and Autumn employs formulaic phrasing and selective omission to encode the priorities of Lu and to communicate the relative importance of individuals, states, and events, and that many of its records are derived from diplomatic announcements received in Lu from regional states and the Zhou court. The Spring and Autumn is fundamentally a document designed to enhance the prestige of Lu, and its records reveal a profound concern with relative rank, displaying an idealized hierarchy that positions the state of Lu and its rulers at the apex. By establishing the Spring and Autumn as a genuine Bronze Age record, this book transforms our understanding of its significance and purpose, and also offers new approaches to the study of ancient annals in early China and elsewhere.

A captivating collection of Cinderella tales translated from more than fifteen languages and cultural traditions, revealing surprising new dimensions to an iconic storyThis anthology brings together fresh, contemporary translations of lesser-known Cinderella tales representing the story’s full geographic range. With an emphasis on Asia and the Middle East, it includes orally transmitted lore along with highly crafted literary tales. Many of these stories are presented here in English for the first time.The tales in this volume challenge popular assumptions about what a Cinderella story ought to be. Though sharing familiar core elements—a dead mother, a cruel stepmother, a magical helper, a lost shoe—they diverge from the well-known storyline in startling ways. Fairy godmothers are vanishingly rare, and fish, cows, frogs, and even ogresses play the part of magical helper. While the heroine is often identified by a shoe, romance tends to remain on the margins. Instead, bitter rivalries between sisters and enduring bonds of affection between mothers and daughters drive the plots. Each tale is accompanied by a brief note introducing its source and cultural context. The book’s invaluable introduction explores the transformations that Cinderella tales have undergone in traveling across languages, cultures, and time, and the role of translation in these transformations.The contributors to this volume, many of whom are award-winning literary translators and writers, have produced splendid new translations that inspire us to reexamine our assumptions about one of the most recognizable fairy tale heroines.The languages from which the tales are translated include Chinese (modern and classical), Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, HMoob, Tibetan, Persian, Arabic (from Iraq, Oman, and Egypt), Hausa, Greek (modern and ancient), Yiddish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, and the Bolognese dialect of Italian.

Shows how the text evolved from a non-narrative historical record into a Confucian classic.The Spring and Autumn is among the earliest surviving Chinese historical records, covering the period 722–479 BCE. It is a curious text: the canonical interpretation claims that it was composed by Confucius and embodies his moral judgments, but this view appears to be contradicted by the brief and dispassionate records themselves. Newell Ann Van Auken addresses this puzzling discrepancy through an examination of early interpretations of the Spring and Autumn, and uncovers a crucial missing link in two sets of commentarial remarks embedded in the Zuǒ Tradition. These embedded commentaries do not seek moral judgments in the Spring and Autumn, but instead interpret its records as produced by a historiographical tradition that was governed by rules related to hierarchy and ritual practice. Van Auken's exploration of the Zuǒ Tradition and other early commentaries sheds light on the transformation of the Spring and Autumn from a simple, non-narrative historical record into a Confucian classic.