Love And Emotions In Traditional Chinese Literature

Do all cultures and historical periods have a concept corresponding to the English word emotion? This collection of essays is concerned with the closest candidate within the Chinese language, namely the term qíng. What is the meaning of this term in different periods and genres? What are the types of discourse in which it is typically found? This volume contains two essays on the notion of qíng in classical sources, two on Chan Buddhist usage, and two on fiction and drama from the Ming and Qing dynasties. An introductory essay discusses the complex historical development of the term. Together, the essays may be read as a first step towards a conceptual history of one of the key terms in traditional Chinese culture.

In Transcultural Lyricism, Jane Qian Liu discusses the extent to which modern Chinese writer-translators borrowed from foreign literary works to create new ways to express emotion and by extension radically transformed the lyrical modes of modern Chinese literature.

The volume is a collections of essays aiming to reconstruct the basic elements that compose the multifaceted discourse on emotions in traditional China. A number of well-known specialists reflect on some fundamental philosophical and linguistic concepts.

In The Culture of Love in China and Europe Paolo Santangelo and Gábor Boros offer a survey of the cults of love developed in the history of ideas and literary production in China and Europe between the 12th and early 19th century. They describe parallel evolutions within the two cultures, and how innovatively these independent civilisations developed their own categories and myths to explain, exalt but also control the emotions of love and their behavioural expressions. The analyses contain rich materials for comparison, point out the universal and specific elements in each culture, and hint at differences and resemblances, without ignoring the peculiar beauty and attractive force of the texts cultivating love.

Just like the self, sensations and emotions expressed in literature are elusive issues. Necessarily separated from living reality and yet, in a sense, a mirror of it, linguistic coding of bodily feeling and emotional feeling became subject of avid interest among scholars of historical emotion research and the history of mentality in intra- and intercultural perspectives. This volume combines eleven essays with critical discussions concerning the bidirectional network of sense perception and emotion. Exploring the theme from different angles - psychological, medical, and literary - From Skin to Heart highlights the intimate interrelationship between bodily sensations, states of mind, and the emotions from pain, illness, and self-destruction to love-sickness and self-sacrifice in early Chinese poetry and ethics and late imperial lyrics and narrative. The partly descriptive, partly analytical essays are contributions of a new wave of Continental and American sinology that, inspired by cultural studies, discourse analysis, and rhetorical analysis, offers fresh views on body and psyche as locked into and emerging from Chinese primary sources. An appendix provides additional examples of the rich linguistic material referring to phenomena of sense perception and the affective sphere and their interdependence.

This mind-opening take on indigenous psychology presents a multi-level analysis of culture to frame the differences between Chinese and Western cognitive and emotive styles. Eastern and Western cultures are seen here as mirror images in terms of rationality, relational thinking, and symmetry or harmony. Examples from the philosophical texts of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and classical poetry illustrate constructs of shading and nuancing emotions in contrast to discrete emotions and emotion regulation commonly associated with traditional psychology. The resulting text offers readers bold new understandings of emotion-based states both familiar (intimacy, solitude) and unfamiliar (resonance, being spoiled rotten), as well as larger concepts of freedom, creativity, and love. Included among the topics: The mirror universes of East and West. In the crucible of Confucianism. Freedom and emotion: Daoist recipes for authenticity and creativity. Chinese creativity, with special focus on solitude and its seekers. Savoring, from aesthetics to the everyday. What is an emotion? Answers from a wild garden of knowledge. Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture has a wealth of research and study potential for undergraduate and graduate courses in affective science, cognitive psychology, cultural and cross- cultural psychology, indigenous psychology, multicultural studies, Asian psychology, theoretical and philosophical psychology, anthropology, sociology, international psychology, and regional studies.

The Guardian's Best Books of 2015 Most people suppose that the whole world knows what it is to love; that romantic love is universal, quintessentially human. Such a supposition has to be able to meet three challenges. It has to justify its underlying assumption that all cultures mean the same thing by the word ‘love’ regardless of language. It has to engage with the scholarly debate on whether or not romantic love was invented in Europe and is uniquely Western. And it must be able to explain why early twentieth-century Chinese writers claimed that they had never known true love, or love by modern Western standards. By addressing these three challenges through a literary, historical, philosophical, biographical and above all comparative approach, this highly original work shows how love’s profile in China shifted with the rejection of arranged marriages and concubinage in favour of free individual choice, monogamy and a Western model of romantic love. ‘This book, Lynn Pan’s best to date, adds a wonderful new angle by encouraging us, via comparison, to better appreciate how unusual, even in some ways exotic, a part of the Western past we take for granted, as though it were natural, actually is. While the reader will learn a great deal about Chinese literary and cultural traditions from this book, if read with an open mind the Western reader may end up rethinking things about his or her tradition just as deeply.’ —Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California at Irvine ‘Nobody writes about China quite as brilliantly as Lynn Pan, who in this new, illuminating work on love showcases her trademark erudition entwined with a novelist’s sensibility. Pan’s rare skill makes the book a treat from start to finish; a sumptuous, deft and moving analysis of China’s relationship with love.’ —Mishi Saran, author of Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang and The Other Side of Light

In China, the debate over the moral status of emotions began around the fourth century BCE, when early philosophers first began to invoke psychological categories such as the mind (xin), human nature (xing), and emotions (qing) to explain the sources of ethical authority and the foundations of knowledge about the world. Although some thinkers during this period proposed that human emotions and desires were temporary physiological disturbances in the mind caused by the impact of things in the world, this was not the account that would eventually gain currency. The consensus among those thinkers who would come to be recognized as the foundational figures of the Confucian and Daoist philosophical traditions was that the emotions represented the underlying, dispositional constitution of a person, and that they embodied the patterned workings of the cosmos itself. Curie Virág sets out to explain why the emotions were such a central preoccupation among early thinkers, situating the entire debate within developments in conceptions of the self, the cosmos, and the political order. She shows that the mainstream account of emotions as patterned reality emerged as part of a major conceptual shift towards the recognition of natural reality as intelligible, orderly, and coherent. The mainstream account of emotions helped to summon the very idea of the human being as a universal category and to establish the cognitive and practical agency of human beings. This book, the first intensive study of the subject, traces the genealogy of these early Chinese philosophical conceptions and examines their crucial role in the formation of ethical, political and cultural values in China.