[Faculty Publications] New Translation by Dr. Josephine Chiu-Duke and Dr. Michael S. Duke

Translated by Josephine Chiu-Duke & Michael S. Duke, this book reveals a history of traditional Chinese knowledge, thought and belief from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries with a new approach that offers a new perspective. It appropriates a wide range of source materials and emphasizes the necessity of understanding ideas and thought in their proper historical contexts. Its analytical narrative focuses on the dialectical interaction between historical background and intellectual thought. While discussing the complex dynamics of interaction among the intellectual thought of elite Chinese scholars, their historical conditions, their canonical texts and the “worlds of general knowledge, thought and belief,” it also illuminates the significance of key issues such as the formation of the Chinese world order and its underlying value system, the origins of Chinese cultural identity, foreign influences, and the collapse of the Chinese world order in the 19th century leading toward the revolutionary events of the 20th century.

 

This book is now available through Brill Press.

 

 


Josephine Chiu-Duke is an Associate Professor of Chinese Intellectual History in the Asian Studies Department of the University of British Columbia. She is the author of To Rebuild the Empire: Lu Chih’s Confucian Pragmatist Approach to the Mid-T’ang Predicament (2000) and the editor of a Chinese work entitled Liberalism and the Humanistic Tradition – Essays in Honor of Professor Lin Yü-sheng (2005). She has also published many articles in both English and Chinese on traditional Chinese women and contemporary Chinese thought.

Michael S. Duke is Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Comparative Literature from the Asian Studies Department of the University of British Columbia. He is the author of several books including Blooming and Contending (1985). He has also translated many modern Chinese works of fiction such as Raise the Red Lantern (1993), The Fat Years (2011) and co-translated with Timothy D. Baker, Cho-yun Hsu, China: A New Cultural History (2012).