A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings

by Zhi Li, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline Lee, Haun Saussy

Overview

Li Zhi's iconoclastic interpretations of history, religion, literature, and social relations have fascinated Chinese intellectuals for centuries. His approach synthesized Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ethics and incorporated the Neo-Confucian idealism of such thinkers as Wang Yangming (1472–1529). The result was a series of heretical writings that caught fire among Li Zhi's contemporaries, despite an imperial ban on their publication, and intrigued Chinese audiences long after his death.

Translated for the first time into English, Li Zhi's bold challenge to established doctrines will captivate anyone curious about the origins of such subtly transgressive works as the sixteenth-century play The Peony Pavilion or the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden), Li Zhi confronts accepted ideas about gender, questions the true identity of history's heroes and villains, and offers his own readings of Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha. Fond of vivid sentiment and sharp expression, Li Zhi made no distinction between high and low literary genres in his literary analysis. He refused to support sanctioned ideas about morality and wrote stinging social critiques. Li Zhi praised scholars who risked everything to expose extortion and misrule. In this sophisticated translation, English-speaking readers encounter the best of this heterodox intellectual's vital contribution to Chinese thought and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231166133
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/07/2016
Series:	Translations from the Asian Classics
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Haun Saussy, born in 1960, is University Professor at the University of Chicago, where his courses range among classical Chinese literature, comparative poetics, translation, and the history of knowledge. His books include The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1993), Great Walls of Discourse (2001), The Ethnography of Rhythm (2016), and Translation as Citation (2018) for which he received the American Comparative Literature Association's Wellek Prize in 2018.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Conventions and Abbreviations
Introduction
Selections from A Book to Burn (Fenshu)
Part I: Prefaces
Part II: Letters
Part III: Miscellaneous Writings: Short Essays and Discourses
Part IV: Readings of History
Part V: Poetry
Selections from Another Book to Burn (Xu fenshu)
Part I: Prefaces
Part II: Letters
Part III: Miscellaneous Writings: Short Essays and Discourses
Part IV: Poetry
From A Book to Keep (Hidden) (Cangshu) (1599)
The Historical Record
Chronology of Li Zhi's Life
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

This volume of judiciously selected and aptly translated works by Li Zhi provides clear glimpses of his mental landscape and the ambient world of late Ming thought. The expert translators have revised hackneyed conventional interpretations of Li, enabling readers to form their own views of this early modern savant.

On-cho Ng

The editors and translators of this volume have masterfully rendered into English the works of the fascinating—and highly controversial—Li Zhi, who significantly impacted late Ming thought. We will never look at the diversity of Chinese culture the same way again.

Kang-i Sun Chang

A rich translation of essays revealing Li Zhi as the epitome of dissent. His tragic suicide culminated Li's life as a free thinker, but at the same time his enemies immortalized him as someone who had defrocked Ming autocracy of its elegantly woven orthodoxies. He also provided Ming precedents for political repression under the Republic of China and the People's Republic. The PRC ironically appropriated Li Zhi's rhetoric, pretending that everyone was now liberated, as long as they towed the party line. Later Pierre Bourdieu honored him as China's homo academicus!

Benjamin A. Elman

This enjoyable book is full of great stories and practical ideas that any entrepreneur can use to be more successful faster.

Brian Tracy

This anthology of Li's writing should prove most useful as a source book for the intellectual thought, aesthetic sensibilities and values in literature and the visual arts, the late Ming religious and philosophical interaction of the 'Three Teachings' - and for an intimate glimpse into literati personal and social relationships of the later imperial era.

Ming Studies - Richard John Lynn

This volume will give easy access to scholars, young students, and public readers to Li Zhi’s profound interpretations of history, philosophy, religion, literature, art, and social relations, engaging the readers in enlightening discussions that this most wrenched, restless soul has been waiting for so long!

China Review International

This is the first book-length translation of the writings of Li Zhi . . . [it] offers a fascinating glimpse of the author’s multifaceted contribution to the sixteenth century intellectual landscape in China.

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) - Yang Ye University of California