Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
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Classical World Literatures - Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,260
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Classical World Literatures - Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons (Hardcover)
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Ever since Karl Jasper's "axial age" paradigm, there have been a
number of influential studies comparing ancient East Asian and
Greco-Roman history and culture. Most of these have centered on the
emergence of the world's philosophical and religious traditions, or
on models of empire building. However, to date there has been no
comparative study involving literatures of multiple traditions in
the ancient East Asian and Mediterranean cultural spheres. At first
glance, it would appear that the literary cultures of early Japan
and Rome share little in common with each other. Yet both were
intimately connected with the literature of antecedent "reference
cultures," China and Greece respectively. These connections had
far-reaching legal, ethical, material, linguistic, bibliographical,
and literary consequences that made for distinctive Sino-Japanese
and Greco-Roman dynamics. Exploring writers from Otomo no Yakamochi
to Sugawara no Michizane and Sei Shonagon and from Cicero and
Virgil to Ovid and Martianus Capella, Classical World Literatures
captures the striking similarities between the ways Early Japanese
writers wrote their own literature through and against the literary
precedents of China and the ways Latin writers engaged and
contested Greek precedents. Chapters engage in issues ranging from
early narratives of literary history, cultural foundation figures,
literature of the capital and poetry of exile, to strategies of
cultural comparison in the form of parody and satire or synoptic
texts. The book also brings to light suggestive divergences that
are rooted in geopolitical, linguistic, sociohistorical, and
aesthetic differences between Early Japanese and Roman literary
cultures. Author Wiebke Denecke examines how Japanese and Latin
writers were affected by an awareness of their own belatedness, how
their strategies in telling of the origins of their own literatures
evolved, and how notions about simplicity, ornateness, and cultural
decline came to be blamed on the influence of their cultural
ancestors. Proposing an innovative 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 reading and
re-reading four major literary traditions of the classical world in
an innovative and illuminating light.
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