The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800 CE (Paperback)

Winner of the Stanislas Julien Prize Winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize for Scholarship on Pre-1900 China Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape-an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke-that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with-and celebrated-the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.

General

Imprint:	Harvard University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series
Release date:	October 2020
Authors:	Robert Ford Campany
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	282
ISBN-13:	978-0-674-24780-2
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > Classical, early & medieval Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Non-Western philosophy > Oriental & Indian philosophy Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General Books > Philosophy > Non-Western philosophy > Oriental & Indian philosophy
LSN:	0-674-24780-9
Barcode:	9780674247802

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!