A Patterned Past

In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the 4th century BCE among the followers of Confucius. He contends that the coherent view of early China found in these texts is an ...

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In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the 4th century BCE among the followers of Confucius. He contends that the coherent view of early China found in these texts is an effect of their origins and the habits of reading they impose. Rather than being totally accurate accounts, they represent the efforts of a group of officials and ministers to argue for a moralising interpretation of the events of early Chinese history and for their own value as skilled interpreters of events and advisers to the rulers of the day.

Conventions
Dukes of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I Speech and Pattern
1 The Rhetoric of Good Order
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Conventions
Dukes of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I Speech and Pattern
1 The Rhetoric of Good Order
Speech and the Order of Prose/ Rhetoric in Practice/ Rhetoric in Theory/ Rhetoric in Philosophy
2 Wen and Meaning of Verbal Art
Wen and Burden of Artifacts/ Texts as Artifacts: Citing and Zhouyi/ Artifacts of the Zhou: Citing Shi and Shangshu/ King Wen and Wenci/ The Concert for Ji Zha
3 Intelligibility in Extra-human World
Heaven and Earth/ The Five Phases and Yin-yang/ Theories of the Human: Music, War, and the Responsive Universe
4 Order in the Human World
Spirits and Ancestors/ Cultural Others/ The Royal Center/ The Hegemon/ Interstate Relations/ Internal Administration/ The Confucian Virtues
Part II Narrative and Justice
5 The Anecdotal History
Readings of Historiographical Narrative/ Form and Judgement/ Experiments in Vision
6 Narrative and Recompense
The Anecdote Series/ Bao and the Economy of Narrative
7 Aesthetics and Meaning
Pleasures and Consequences/ Poetry Recitation/ War and the Utopian Gesture
8 Writing and the Ends of History
The Invisible Authors/ Time and Narration/ The Decline of the Zhou Order/ The Rise of the South/ The Dilemma of Writing/ The Death of Confucius and the Birth of HIstoriography
Appendix
Orality and the Origins of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu
Reference Matter
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