Chinese Sympathies

Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe.

Analyzing key German literary texts—theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cycles—Chinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe's concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful similarities across culturally diverse literatures based on shared human experiences.

Files

Metadata

Work Title Chinese Sympathies
Subtitle Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Daniel Leonhard Purdy
License CC BY-NC 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial)
Work Type Book
Publisher
  1. Cornell University Press
Publication Date October 15, 2021
Subject
  1. Philosophy
  2. Civilization, Western— Chinese influences
  3. Orientalism— Europe— History
  4. Sympathy—Europe—History
  5. German literature—Chinese influences
  6. Europe— Intellectual life
  7. China— Intellectual life
Language
  1. English
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.7298/sxq8-8068
Related URLs
Deposited November 10, 2021

Versions

Analytics

Collections

Work History

Version 1
published

  • Created
  • Added Creator Daniel Leonhard Purdy
  • Added 9781501759765_web.pdf
  • Added 9781501759758_epub.epub
  • Updated Publication Date, License Show Changes
    Publication Date
    • 2021/10/15
    • 2021-10-15
    License
    • https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
  • Published
  • Updated
  • Updated