Five Classics

Although the term “Five Classics” (The Odes; Documents; the three Rites classics, counted as one; the Annals, and the Changes) was probably coined in Western Han, for much of Chinese history the Five Classics corpus has been the common cultural coin of the realm, familiar to all educated people, regardless of their religious creeds or ethical persuasions. Although parts of the Five Classics have claimed Confucius, as author, editor, or teacher, others may not have derived from self-identified “followers of Confucius,” of which there were very few in Antiquity. Given the importance of the Five Classics as repositories of ethical and political teachings, numerous debates over the “correct” graphs and meanings assigned to passages in the Five Classics have continued unabated from Western Han times down to today, in China, among the Chinese diaspora, and abroad, perhaps the most famous being the Qing-era “New Text/Old Text” debates. Only recently have Euro-American scholars, in company with some of their East Asian counterparts, begun to acknowledge at least two “general shifts in the textual landscape,” the first of which took place during Song, spurred, perhaps, by the Song ancient prose movement, and the second around the turn of the 20th century, when leading scholars and political reformers began to debate the role of the Five Classics in the education of the wenren文人 (men and women of letters) and the general populace, a debate that is still raging in some quarters, given the Chinese Communist Party’s belated flirtation with Confucian ethics. A few modern scholars, in addition, would emphasize the conceptual ruptures that also accompanied the changeovers from seal script to clerical script, and from regular script to simplified. What has proved equally disruptive in recent years is the insistence by some Chinese authorities that unprovenanced materials bought on the market in Hong Kong or Japan be accorded the same “weight” as scientifically excavated manuscripts or texts transmitted via the received literary tradition. Past experience suggests that patient accumulation and sifting of the evidence is preferable to overly hasty judgements about the reliability of such manuscripts.

Women in Patriarchy: A Study of Sexual Colonialism in Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough, a famous Australian women novelist, extensively deals with the issue of sexual colonization by exhibiting the fact that this world belongs to men not to women where women suffer and men cause them pain. Meggie, the central character in the novel is shown as the victim, sufferer and the colonized individual and Paddy, Ralph and Luke are shown as the epitome of the British colonizers who misused, misbehaved and degraded the women during their colonial rule. The novelist while sketching women characters does not asseverate as ostensible women of letters but for the delineation of patriarchy in the novel The Thorn Birds which clearly manifests her declivity in the vicinity of the infringement with women in Australian society.

Entre la voz y el silencio: autoridad femenina en La Sigea de Carolina Coronado

In the novel La Sigea (1854) Carolina Coronado portrays a 16th-century humanist, Luisa Sigea de Velasco, revendicating her criticism of the situation of the creative woman. In this work, Coronado illustrates both the Renaissance reality of the scholarly courtesan, and her own nineteenth-century author-identity, by sharing the disappointment and frustration they suffered as women of letters in contexts of male hegemony. In the following pages we investigate the vindication of female authorship as a creative authority.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the major themes of the book as well as the cast of characters: the over one hundred writers and intellectuals whose work and activities are the focus of what follows in the seven chapters. It dwells considerably on the ethos of retreat—otium—as a governing principle of men and women of letters in this period following the Wars of Religion. It also deals with the historiographical background of this study, acknowledging several generations of historians and literary scholars. The chapter also presages other themes that will follow: honnêteté, Gallicanism, as well as the literary and intellectual sociability of Paris in the generations following the Wars of Religion.

Dignified Retreat

Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s first minister and the architect of French absolutism, is often celebrated for his role in reviving the arts and letters in the crucial period in the formation of French classicism. This book looks less at him than at the writers and intellectuals themselves in the creation of a new culture distinguished by the rise of the French language over Latin and the emergence of a literary field. The author argues that even the French Academy, founded by Richelieu in 1635, was more the result of an already established literary and linguistic movement that he merely managed to co-opt. Dignified Retreat examines the work and activities of over one hundred writers and intellectuals, focusing especially on their place in the urban context of a revived Paris after several generations of religious warfare in the sixteenth century. The theme of “retreat”—a withdrawal from public engagement and certain modes of public expression—runs throughout the book as a leitmotif that captures the ambivalent position of these men (and a few women) of letters as they tried to establish the legitimacy of their calling outside the established institutions of the Church, the law, and the university. Building on the work of such French literary scholars and historians as Marc Fumaroli, Alain Viala, Hélène-Merlin Kajman, Christian Jouhaud, and others, Schneider offers a novel approach to this important period in French cultural history.