"For hundreds of years, into the twentieth century, the culture groups in the areas we now know as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam shared a great many political and social values, religious beliefs, and artistic and literary traditions. These common cultural features were recorded and transmitted in the same basic written language-classical or literary Chinese (known as guwen/wenyan in China, Kanbun in Japan, Hanmun in Korea, and Hánvan in Vietnam). The umbrella term for this shared language is 'literary Sinitic'-a term designed to recognize the fact that although guwen/wenyan originally developed in China, it had a vibrant life of its own in other areas of East Asia (i.e., what this study terms the Sinosphere). Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation will appeal not only to academic specialists in the histories, philosophies, literary and artistic traditions of East Asia, but also to instructors of college-level courses in East Asian history and culture"--

"For hundreds of years, into the twentieth century, the culture groups in the areas we now know as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam shared a great many political and social values, religious beliefs, and artistic and literary traditions. These common cultural features were recorded and transmitted in the same basic written language-classical or literary Chinese (known as guwen/wenyan in China, Kanbun in Japan, Hanmun in Korea, and Hánvan in Vietnam). The umbrella term for this shared language is "literary Sinitic"-a term designed to recognize the fact that although guwen/wenyan originally developed in China, it had a vibrant life of its own in other areas of East Asia (i.e., what this study terms the Sinosphere). This huge but understudied body of written documents offers extraordinarily rich resources for examining issues of cultural continuity and change in this important region of the world. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the political and social turmoil in East Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all four cultures abandoned their use of literary Sinitic. As a result, a great many documents written in this important script have been ignored, leaving a substantial gap in our understanding of the relationship between the histories and cultures of premodern East Asia. Like its companion volume, Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics and Identity Formation, this book seeks to fill this gap. One of the primary goals of this study is to break down the intellectual and cultural barriers that have made the Sinosphere difficult to see for itself. These barriers are of two sorts. One is the academic tendency toward intense specialization; most scholars of East Asia focus on a single country, a well-defined period, and an equally well-defined discipline (linguistics, philosophy, history, literature, art, etc.). Another is the tendency of scholars to privilege the country and period they study, and to adhere closely to their disciplinary training and outlook. To break down these barriers, a group of highly accomplished scholars committed to cross-cultural comparisons and interdisciplinary perspectives have been selected for this volume, and the result is a careful and critical examination of the complex cultural interactions that took place in premodern East Asia. Among the many contributions of this study are its examination of different literary genres (including "classics," poetic primers, works for and about women, detective stories, and folksongs), its broad chronological scope (from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries), its equally extensive spatial range (including China, the Xi Xia Kingdom, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea), and its attention to "minority" cultures. Another distinctive feature of this volume is its exploration of epistemological and culture change in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East Asia Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia will appeal not only to academic specialists in the histories, philosophies, literary and artistic traditions of East Asia, but also to instructors of college-level courses in East Asian history and culture"--

Bitterly contested memories of war, colonisation, and empire among Japan, China, and Korea have increasingly threatened regional order and security over the past three decades. In Sino-Japanese relations, identity, territory, and power pull together in a particularly lethal direction, generating dangerous tensions in both geopolitical and memory rivalries. Buzan and Goh explore a new approach to dealing with this history problem. First, they construct a more balanced and global view of China and Japan in modern world history. Second, building on this, they sketch out the possibilities for a 21st century great power bargain between them. Buzan puts Northeast Asia's history since 1840 into both a world historical and a systematic normative context, exposing the parochial nature of the China-Japan history debate in relation to what is a bigger shared story about their encounter with modernity and the West, within which their modern encounter with each other took place. Arguing that regional order will ultimately depend substantially on the relationship between these two East Asian great powers, Goh explores the conditions under which China and Japan have been able to reach strategic bargains in the course of their long historical relationship, and uses this to sketch out the main modes of agreement that might underpin a new contemporary great power bargain between them in a variety of future scenarios for the region. The frameworks adopted here consciously blend historical contextualisation, enduring concerns with wealth, power and interest, and the complex relationship between Northeast Asian states' evolving encounters with each other and with global international society.

Among the many contributions of this study are its examination of different literary genres, its broad chronological scope (from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries), its equally extensive spatial range (including China, the Xi Xia Kingdom, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea), and its attention to "minority" cultures.

Sino-Japanese Reflections offers ten richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider efforts by early modern scholars on each side of the Yellow Sea to understand the language and culture of the other, to draw upon received texts and forms, and to contribute to shared literary practices. Whereas literary and cultural flow within the Sinosphere is sometimes imagined to be an entirely unidirectional process of textual dissemination from China to the periphery, the contributions to this volume reveal a more complex picture: highlighting how literary and cultural engagement was always an opportunity for creative adaptation and negotiation. Examining materials such as Chinese translations of Japanese vernacular poetry, Japanese engagements with Chinese supernatural stories, adaptations of Japanese historical tales into vernacular Chinese, Sinitic poetry composed in Japan, and Japanese Sinology, the volume brings together recent work by literary scholars and intellectual historians of multiple generations, all of whom have a strong comparative interest in Sino-Japanese studies.

Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wake-up call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume. Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.