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Ideographia - The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Hardcover)
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Ideographia - The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Hardcover)
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From the first successful Jesuit mission in 1583 until the
disastrous failure of the British trade embassy in 1816, China's
cultural practices transfixed the attention of Western
philosophers, theologians, architects, artists, entrepreneurs, and
social critics. The direct influences on European culture were many
and profound, ranging from Chinese teahouses in European palace
gardens to adaptations of Chinese plays for the popular stage, from
calls for the restructuring of the civil service on the model of
Chinese meritocracy to the espousal of Confucian precepts in the
moral education of children.
More significant than even such readily visible gestures of
imitation and appropriation, however, were the interpretive
strategies that accompanied them: the processes by which Europeans
translated the unfamiliar and often enigmatic artifacts of Chinese
culture into familiar forms of meaning, thus engaging them in the
emergent discourses of European modernity.
This book traces recurrent patterns in the European imaginative
constructions of China through four illuminating spheres of
encounter: linguistic, theological, aesthetic, and economic. How
might we compare the perplexity of Europeans before the Chinese
writing system with their experience of Chinese religious practice,
trade policy, or porcelain design? The author shows how the
remarkably consistent interpretive paradigms revealed through such
comparisons suggest not only how historical circumstances condition
and constrain responses to the foreign but also how an active
engagement with the cipher of foreignness shapes the way a society
comes to understand itself.
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