Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
In Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination, Anne Schmiedl analyses the little-studied method of Chinese character manipulation as found in imperial sources. Focusing on one of the most famous and important works on this subject, the Zichu by Zhou Lianggong (1612–1672), Schmiedl traces and discusses the historical development and linguistic properties of this method. This book represents the first thorough study of the Zichu and the reader is invited to explore how, on the one hand, the educated elite leveraged character manipulation as a literary play form. On the other hand, as detailed exhaustively by Schmiedl, practitioners of divination also used and altered the visual, phonetic, and semantic structure of Chinese characters to gain insights into events and objects in the material world.
Price: $175.00
Pages: 356
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Prognostication in History
Publication Date:
09 April 2020
ISBN: 9789004422360
Format: Hardcover
"this volume's greatest strength lies in its fundamental mission: providing a rare and exciting insight into how divination practitioners utilized “graphic, phonetic, and semantic elements of writing.” - Joseph Chadwin, University of Vienna, Religious Studies Review 47/3 (2021).
Anne Schmiedl, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her work and publications focus on Chinese script, religion, and philosophy.