Wang Kuo-wei : an intellectual biography

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Wang Kuo-wei : an intellectual biography

Joey Bonner

(Harvard East Asian series, 101)

Harvard University Press, 1986

  • alk. paper

Other Title

王 國維

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Note

Bibliography: p. 285-299

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In this first full-fledged intellectual biography of the brilliant and multifaceted Chinese scholar Wang Kuo-wei (1877-1927), Joey Bonner throws important new light on the range and course of ideas in early twentieth-century China. Coincidentally, she illuminates the nature of Wang's intimate, thirty-year personal and professional association with the well-known Chinese scholar Lo Chen-yu (1866-1940) and provides a most comprehensive and compelling account of her biographee's posthumously controversial career in the years following the 1911 Revolution. Pursuing her subject across the whole spectrum of his many scholarly interests, Bonner critically examines Wang's essays on German philosophy and philosophical aesthetics; his poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory; and his works on ancient Chinese history, particularly of the Shang dynasty. Insightfully relating his strenuous intellectual search in the fields of philosophy, literature, and history to his very personal quest for truth, beauty, and virtue, Bonner shows in this finely crafted book how Wang's unhappiness in later life as well as his suicide can be understood only within the context of his humanistic concerns in general and his extreme commitment in the postimperial period to the Confucian ethicoreligious tradition in particular. Without compromising the clearheaded critical detachment that characterizes her analysis of the intricacies of his thought, Bonner has produced a portrait of Wang Kuo-wei suffused with warmth and sympathetic respect.

Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Prologue: The 1890s Generation 2. The Early Years 3. Wang as Educational Critic 4. Declaration of Principles 5. The Critical Philosophy 6. The Philosophy of Metaphysical Pessimism 7. Analysis of Dream of the Red Chamber 8. Disillusionment with Philosophy 9. The Aesthetic Education of Man 10. Wang's Lyrics, Lyric Criticism, and Mature Aesthetic Theory 11. Critique of Yuan Drama 12. Conservative Commitments 13. Archaeological Enthusiasms 14. Wang as Shang Genealogist 15. The Later Years 16. Epilogue: Across the Barriers of Culture and Time Abbreviations Notes Selected Bibliography Glossary Index

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