The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse - Hardcover

Chow, Kai-wing

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804721734 ISBN 13: 9780804721738

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1994

Synopsis

This pathbreaking work argues that the major intellectual trend in China from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century was Confucian ritualism, as expressed in ethics, classical learning, and discourse on lineage. Reviews "Chow has produced a work of superb scholarship, fluently written and beautifully researched. . . . One of the landmarks of the current reconstruction of the social philosophy of the Qing dynasty. . . . Chow's book is indispensable. It has illuminating analyses of many mainstream writers, institutions, and social categories in eighteenth-century China which have never previously been examined." —Canadian Journal of History "Chow's monograph moves ritual to center stage in late imperial social and intellectual history, and the author makes a powerful case for doing so. . . . Because the author understands the intellectual history of late Ming and Qing as the history of a movement, or successive movements, of fundamental social reform, he has also made an important contribution to social and political history as these were related to intellectual history." —Journal of Chinese Religion "Chow's book is an excellent contribution to recent scholarship on the intellectual history of the Confucian tradition and provides a balance for other studies that have emphasized ideas to the exclusion of symbols." —The Historian

About this title

About the Author

Kai-wing Chow is Assistant Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

From the Back Cover

“Wide-ranging, exhaustively documented, bold in its interpretations, and attuned simultaneously to questions of intellectual and social history—a rarity in sinological studies—this work will cause a sweeping reassessment of the eighteenth century in modern China’s ‘Confucian’ past. The author’s exciting new interpretation of textual scholarship and classical studies both challenges existing theories in modern Chinese intellectual history and adds rich support for new studies of social change at the local level in late imperial times.”—Susan Mann, University of California, Davis
“Excellent. . . . Much of Chow’s book is devoted to delineating the relationship between scholarly debates on ritual and concrete efforts at lineage building. In this endeavor he pulls together several major strands of recent scholarship on the Ch’ing: work on intellectual trends, elite patterns of dominance, lineage development, ritual, and popular culture.”—Journal of Asian Studies

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804721734
• ISBN 13: 9780804721738
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360