Historical Chinese Letter Writing [Paperback]

D?niel Z. K?d?r was awarded with the Academy Award for Young Outstanding Scholars by
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for this book.

Letter writing is a pivotal yet neglected medium of historical Chinese communication. The epistolary format is key to sinological research. As historical letters have a specific vocabulary and rhetorical structure it is difficult to read them without the supporting apparatus of specialised study.

This compendium fills the gap in Chinese studies by providing a bilingual Chinese-English edition of a corpus of Chinese letters, prepared for advanced students of Classical Chinese as well as academics with an interest in historical Chinese epistolary art. The book has a broad and general introduction, systematically constructed vocabulary sections as well as detailed grammatical and philological explanations.

It focuses on Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) letter writing, a high point of pre-1911 epistolary activity in Chinese, and will appeal to Chinese scholars and Sinologists at a broad range of academic levels.

PrefacePart I: Family Letter Writing 1.Family Letter Writing I: Letters of Zheng Banqiao 2. Family Letter Writing II: Letters of Zeng Guofan Part II: Specialized' Epistolary Discourse 3. Specialized' Epistolary Discourse I: Literary Letters of Jin Shengtan 4. 'Specialized' Epistolary Discourse II: Scholarly Letters of Gu Yanwu Part III: Non-family Social' Letter Writing 5. Non-Family Social' Letters I: Letters of Xu Jiacun 6. Non-Family Social' Letters II: Letters of Gong Weizhai Joint Exercise for Chapters 5 and 6 Part IV: Political Letter Writing 7. Political Letters: A Long Letter of Yuan Shikai Postscript: What next? Appendix I: The Chinese Texts (printed in a punctuatedlƒ"