Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, sponsored by the Modern Language Association
Exemplary Figures (sometimes translated as Model Sayings) is an unabridged, annotated translation of Fayan, one of three major works by the Chinese court poet-philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE-18 CE). Yang sought to ‘renew the old’ by patterning these works on earlier classics, drawing inspiration from the Confucian Analects for Exemplary Figures. In this philosophical masterwork, constructed as a dialogue, Yang poses and then answers questions on philosophical, political, ethical, and literary matters. Michael Nylan’s rendering of this text, which is laden with word play and is extraordinarily difficult to translate, is a joy to read-at turns wise, cautionary, and playful.
Exemplary Figures is a core text that will be relied upon by scholars of Chinese history and philosophy and will be of interest to comparativists as well.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Chronology of Dynasties
Introduction
Exemplary Figures / Fayan
1. Learning and Practicing
2. Our Masters
3. Cultivating One’s Person
4. Asking about the Way
5. Asking about Divine Insight
6. Asking about Illumination
7. Things Rarely Seen
8. Every Five Hundred Years
9. Foresight
10. Chong and Li
11. Yan Yuan and Min Ziqian
12. The Noble Man
13. Honoring the Ancestors, the Ultimate Duty
Glossary of Names, Legendary and Historical
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Michael Nylan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Five ‘Confucian’ Classics (Yale University Press, 2001) and Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China (American Oriental Society, 2011), coauthor of Lives of Confucius: Civilization’s Greatest Sage through the Ages (Doubleday, 2010); translator of Exemplary Figures (University of Washington Press, 2013) and The Canon of Supreme Mystery (SUNY Press, 1993) by Yang Xiong; and coeditor of Chang’an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China (University of Washington Press, 2014).
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
758 Ebooks in this category
