Robert Markley and Sara E. Trowbridge
Yu Liu offers a groundbreaking analysis of cross-cultural exchange by exploring the influence of Chinese philosophical traditions on English art, gardening, and literature up to the Romantic period. This is a must-read for scholars interested in Anglo-Chinese relations between 1600 and 1830.
Leo Damrosch
In this deeply learned study, Yu Liu traces a 'relay of ideas' that made their way from Chinese philosophy to Western Romanticism, transformed along the way in Spinoza's thought and in theories of English landscape gardening. A tour de force of intellectual history, his book shapes a persuasive story out of disparate strands whose significance deepens when seen in a unifying perspective.
Robert Markley
Yu Liu offers a groundbreaking analysis of cross-cultural exchange by exploring the influence of Chinese philosophical traditions on English art, gardening, and literature up to the Romantic period. This is a must-read for scholars interested in Anglo-Chinese relations between 1600 and 1830.
Roger T. Ames
In his powerfully original monograph, From Chinese Cosmology to English Romanticism, Yu Liu upends the all-too-familiar asymmetry of theorizing Chinese culture through a Western conceptual structure. He mounts a carefully documented and compelling argument that the 'idea' of the persistent Chinese organismic worldview captured in the language of 'humanity's unity with nature' set its roots in the antinomian European Enlightenment thinkers as early as the complex Rites Controversy, and then spreads out as a root system through the heretical philosopher Spinoza to shape British Romanticism in all of its parts.
D. E. Mungello
A thoughtful and imaginative attempt to trace the migration of the ancient Chinese cosmological unity of heaven and humanity to seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century Europe via the China Jesuits, Spinoza, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, leading to the redesign of English gardens and Romantic poetry.