Overview
Only fragments of historical text from China's middle period have been translated into English, until now. Here at last is the first major Chinese historical work from the Song dynasty. Written by Ouyang Xiu, an intellectual giant of the eleventh century, this is a history of the preceding century (907—979), a period known as the Five Dynasties.
The historical and literary significance of Ouyang's achievement cannot be underestimated. In rewriting the existing official history of the Five Dynasties, Ouyang — whose own time was characterized by extraordinary intellectual and political innovation — made several notable decisions. He rewrote the history in the "ancient" style preferred by forward-thinking literati; he even rewrote the original documents quoted within biographies. He also relied on his own moral categories, reevaluating the worth of the historical figures in light of his own convictions that individuals should take personal responsibility for the fate of society. Ouyang's history would eventually become the official version — the last state-sanctioned dynastic history of imperial China to be written by an individual in a private capacity. In addition to its provocative insights and lucid presentation, Historical Records of the Five Dynasties is an eloquent statement on the art of historical writing in the eleventh century.
A preeminent scholar of Chinese history, Richard L. Davis has provided a thorough introduction and rendered nearly two-thirds of the Chinese original into English, including complete sections critical to understanding the politics and personalities of the time. Biographical clusters based on Ouyang's moral categories also appear in full, helping readers to appreciate the Confucian agenda that informs the work.
Synopsis
In The Great Good Place, Malcolm Kelsall examines how the ideal of the English country house has grown and changed over the centuries. Kelsall looks at the great house as an ideal that persisted long after the social and political arrangements that the manor represented had ceased to exist, and as a reality, providing detailed descriptions of particular homes. Kelsall tells the story of a conservative tradition that, rooted in classical antiquity, was first made distinctively English by the poets of the Renaissance. This tradition was shaped further by the novelists of the eighteenth century who depicted the country home as the locus of "the good life." Today, the country manor is an ideal under stress. Originally challenged by the ideological implications of the French Revolution, English manor society and its subsequent literary representations have increasingly become things of spirit. For writers late in this tradition like Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, "the great good place" was no longer the center of the social community but rather an imaginative idea communicated between appreciative minds. The Great Good Place shows us how our ways of seeing are shaped by reading. Kelsall looks at houses made famous by writers, such as Penshurst, Stowe, and Kelmscott, and investigates them in light of those writings. He provides detailed and original analyses of works by Jonson, Marvell, Pope, Byron, Fielding, and Austen - all of which feature great country houses as major "characters." Seen in terms of the literature of the age, Van Dyck's family portrait acquires new meaning, and even the decoration on a stove at Kedleston accrues resonances which carry the reader back to the classical age. In this eminently readable study, there is no division between the visual arts and literature, or between high culture and the commonplace. A novel or a travel guidebook, a great landscape garden or the design of a dormer window, all form part of the spectrum of meaning. Illustr
Booknews
Kelsall (English, U. of Wales, Cardiff) shows how literature influences how people perceive visual imagery, by comparing country houses as they sit in the physical world and as they function as characters in fiction and poetry. Over 30 photographs accompany the consideration of writing from the Renaissance to Virginia Woolf and Henry James. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)