Exemplary Figures / Fayan法言 (Classics of Chinese Thought) - Hardcover

Yang, Xiong

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295992891 ISBN 13: 9780295992891

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2013

Synopsis

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, sponsored by the Modern Language Association

Exemplary Figures (sometimes translated as Model Sayings) is an unabridged, annotated translation of Fayan, one of three major works by the Chinese court poet-philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE-18 CE). Yang sought to "renew the old" by patterning these works on earlier classics, drawing inspiration from the Confucian Analects for Exemplary Figures. In this philosophical masterwork, constructed as a dialogue, Yang poses and then answers questions on philosophical, political, ethical, and literary matters. Michael Nylan's rendering of this text, which is laden with word play and is extraordinarily difficult to translate, is a joy to read-at turns wise, cautionary, and playful.

Exemplary Figures is a core text that will be relied upon by scholars of Chinese history and philosophy and will be of interest to comparativists as well.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Nylan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Five "Confucian" Classics (Yale University Press, 2001) and Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China (American Oriental Society, 2011), coauthor of Lives of Confucius: Civilization's Greatest Sage through the Ages (Doubleday, 2010); translator of Exemplary Figures (University of Washington Press, 2013) and The Canon of Supreme Mystery (SUNY Press, 1993) by Yang Xiong; and coeditor of Chang'an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China (University of Washington Press, 2014).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295992891
• ISBN 13: 9780295992891
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360