Stephen W. Durrant – författare

Sima Qian's writings have influenced the Chinese for over 2,000 years and still serve as a fiscal source of historical information about China.Sima Qian's vast Records of the Historian is the first comprehensive history of China and has exerted an immense influence both upon our understanding of the Chinese past and also upon the style and structure of subsequent Chinese historiography. In addition to his contribution as a historian, Sima Qian is a highly significant literary figure whose writings are among the most elegant and powerful from the ancient world.Durrant's study approaches Sima Qian's work from a literary perspective and demonstrates the relationship between Sima's narrative of the past and his narrative of his own life. That life was a fascinating and complex one. Enjoined by his father to complete a comprehensive history of China, Sima Qian subsequently offended the great Emperor Wu and was sentenced to castration. Rather than take the "noble path" of suicide, he suffered this traumatic punishment and lived on to fulfill his father's injunction-but not without emotional scars, scars that influenced his portrayal of the Chinese past. In fact, the great Han historian's account of the Chinese past, this study argues, is as much his story as it is history.

The first edited volume in Sino-Hellenic studies, this book compares early Chinese and ancient Greek thought and culture.This pioneering book compares Chinese and Western thought to offer a bracing and unpredictable cross-cultural conversation. The work contributes to the emerging field of Sino-Hellenic studies, which links two great and influential cultures that, in fact, had virtually no contact during the ancient period. The patterns of thought and the cultural productions of early China and ancient Greece represent two significantly different responses to the myriad problems that human beings confront. Throughout this volume the comparisons between these cultures evince two critical ideas. First, that thinking is itself an inherently comparative activity. Through making comparisons, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange somewhat more familiar. Second, since we think through comparisons, we should think them all the way through. How valid and productive are the comparisons and contrasts made between particular works and different styles of thought that emerged from two different, although contemporaneous, cultural contexts?