Beyond Sinocentrism

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Cambria Sinophone World Series.</strong></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This book offers the first sustained study of fictional encounters with ethnocultural others in early modern Chinese literature. Focusing on narratives from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries it examines how Chinese literati engaged with a changing world through imaginative depictions of the foreign-revealing cultural pride anxiety curiosity and critique.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Bringing together literary analysis global history postcolonial theory and cultural anthropology the book challenges the common portrayal of imperial China as isolated and inward-looking. Instead it reveals a dynamic interplay of Sinocentric confidence and openness to global knowledge in texts such as Yesou puyan and Jinghua yuan.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>An important study for scholars of Chinese literature history and world literature </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Beyond Sinocentrism</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> sheds new light on how early modern Chinese narratives negotiated identity and power in a globalizing world. It offers a vital corrective to both Sinocentric and Eurocentric paradigms in the study of China's place in global history.</span></p><p></p>