China's Philological Turn by Ori Sela

China's Philological Turn by Ori Sela

In eighteenth-century China, a remarkable intellectual transformation took place, centered on the ascendance of philology. In China's Philological Turn, Ori Sela foregrounds the polymath Qian Daxin to reconstruct the history of eighteenth-century Chinese learning and its long-lasting consequences.

Ori Sela clearly and persuasively argues for the importance of the philological turn in the late eighteenth century, explaining fully the larger moral and intellectual justification for the turn and its significance for the whole course of Chinese intellectual historyThis book also treats an extremely important figure in the history of Chinese scholarship, Qian Daxin. Sela makes clear both the remarkable range and depth of Qian’s philological scholarship and the crucial moral and ethical importance that Qian saw in what has often been dismissed as dry pedantry. -- Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University
In China’s Philological Turn, Sela explicates the superlative classical scholarship championed by the literatus Qian Daxin (1728–1804). Among the leading classicists in Qing China, Qian and his students and colleagues were forgotten after the Opium War. Overlapping the prisms of society, ideas, and science, Sela reexamines China’s eighteenth-century philological revolution and convincingly shows that modern historians have generally overlooked the ‘philological turn’ from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. -- Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University
In this rich and lucidly argued account of the mid-Qing revolution in Chinese intellectual thought and identity, presented on its own terms and within the contexts of social history and the history of science, Ori Sela definitively lays to rest outdated understandings of China's relation to the modern world. It is a timely reminder of the contemporary resonance of historical understanding. -- Joanna Waley-Cohen, Julius Silver Professor of History, New York University and Provost, NYU Shanghai
A well-researched work and offers a new standard for the comprehensive study of high-Qing polymaths. For years
to come, it will be an important reference for conceiving the relationship between Han learning and Song learning, philology and science, social network and scholarly pathway. * East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine *

Ori Sela is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780231183826
ISBN 10	0231183828
Title	China's Philological Turn
Author	Ori Sela
Series	Studies Of The Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Columbia University Press
Year published	2018-04-03
Number of pages	328
Prizes	Commended for Pre-1900 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies 2020
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.