Title: THE SHAPE OF HISTORY: ON READING LI WAI-YEE
Abstract: Ever since Hayden White declared that as a literary artifact the historical text is indistinguishable from fiction, the study of historiography has ceased to be the prerogative of historians. It is thus no accident that we owe some of the finest recent works on the Zuo zhuan , China's oldest narrative history, not to historians but to scholars of Chinese literature. In her splendid book on The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge 2007) Li Wai-yee demonstrates just how fruitful it is to treat Chinese historiography from a literary perspective. She puts to rest the “idea that kernels of historical truth can or should be separated from the rich verbal fabric” in favor of “what is more germane to the sense of history,” namely “the conscious formulation of patterns and principles to understand the past” (Li 2007, pp. 2–3).
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 15
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