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Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons

Ever since Karl Jaspers’s “axial age” paradigm, there have been a number of influential studies comparing ancient East Asian and Greco-Roman history and culture. However, to date there has been no comparative study involving multiple literary traditions in these cultural spheres. This book compares the dynamics between the younger literary cultures of Japan and Rome and the literatures of their venerable predecessors, China and Greece. How were writers of the younger cultures of Rome and Japan affected by the presence of an older “reference culture,” whose sophistication they admired, even as they anxiously strove to assert their own distinctive identity? How did they tackle the challenge of adopting the reference culture’s literary genres, rhetorical refinement, and conceptual vocabulary for writing texts in different languages and within distinct political and cultural contexts?

Classical World Literatures captures the striking similarities between the ways early Japanese authors wrote their own literature through and against the literary precedents of China, and the ways Latin writers engaged and contested Greek precedents. But it also brings to light suggestive divergences that are rooted in geopolitical, linguistic, sociohistorical, and aesthetic differences between early Japanese and Roman literary cultures. Proposing a methodology of “deep comparison” for the cross-cultural comparison of premodern literary cultures and calling for an expansion of world literature debates into the ancient and medieval worlds, Classical World Literatures is both a theoretical intervention and an invitation to read and re-read four major literary traditions in an innovative and illuminating light.

В этой книге сравнивается культурная динамика японо-китайской и греко-римской литератур и исследуются способы, с помощью которых «молодые» культуры соотносятся со своими почтенными предшественниками. Как на писателей Рима и Японии влияло присутствие более древней, «эталонной» культуры, утонченностью которой они восхищались, стремясь при этом утвердить и свою собственную самобытность. Исследуя труды писателей от Сугавара-но Митидзанэ до Сэй Сёнагон, от Цицерона до Овидия и Марциана, Вибке Денеке демонстрирует поразительное сходство между тем, как ранние японские писатели писали свою собственную литературу с опорой на художественные достижения Китая, и тем, как латинские писатели использовали и оспаривали греческий опыт.

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History of Humanities, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2024

THEME: SHARED PASTS FOR SHARED FUTURES; PROTOTYPING A COMPARATIVE GLOBAL HUMANITIES 

This volume argues for a comparative and global reimagination of the humanities in their intellectual, disciplinary, and larger institutional forms. We seek to expand the geographical scope and temporal depth of inquiry while challenging Eurocentric biases through the promotion of neglected traditions and their conceptual vocabularies. Crucial to the success of our “comparative global humanities” is scholarship that fully embraces the complexities and diversities of human pasts.

TEASER: Read the introduction by the co-editors Wiebke Denecke, Alexander Forte, and Tristan Brown HERE.

From the introduction: From Crisis to New Adjectives

We cannot not hear that the humanities are in crisis. Retrenched. Out-STEMed. Demoralized. But we are also hearing: the humanities are resurrecting. Blossoming in unexpected corners. Becoming seriously public. Critical to this critical moment. Until a decade ago, for decades, the outcry was: Crisis!

Now we have the luxury to ask, Which humanities? Adjectives abound. Public, applied, old, new, medical, environmental, digital, positive, planetary, global, even “blue” (maritime)!¹ This proliferation of qualifiers signals vitality, but also a frantic quest for new semantic framings of an old European protean noun. Right in the moment when we keep probing what the “humanities” are, what they could or should be, adjectives come in as “fixers”: they make a slippery and currently slipping concept legible to our new frameworks. The adjectives are also carriers of our postdisciplinary desires, attempts to rally around topics and causes rather than, as conventionally, around divergent sources, methods, and disciplinary lingo. There is a futuristic, utopian thrust animating this growing procession of adjectives and related missions.

Brown has written a new book about this rich and overlooked past, “Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China,” published this month by Princeton University Press. In it, he examines the place of fengshui in Chinese society, specifically as a doctrine of knowledge used to inform legal cases and public policy decisions at a time of industrialization and modernization. In this sense, fengshui was not a matter of private taste, but a crucial part of the public sphere.

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The book “Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations,” edited by Michael Stanley-Baker, was published in November 2023. This book tackles how health was desired or restored in Asia historically, placing healing practices into the hands of the actors who wielded the practices, materials, tools and spirits of healing and their lore. 

Link: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526160010/