Chinese Sympathies : : Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe / / Daniel Leonhard Purdy.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Purdy, Daniel Leonhard,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2022]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (420 p.) :; 3 b&w halftones

Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—and 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 connections 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Sympathy and Orientalism -- 1 Marco Polo’s Fabulous Imperial Connections -- 2 Jesuit Channels between Europe and Asia -- 3 A Genealogy of Cosmopolitan Reading -- 4 News of the Ming Dynasty’s Collapse -- 5 Vondel’s Tragic Chinese Emperor -- 6 Wieland’s Secret History of Cosmopolitanism -- 7 Adam Smith and the Chinese Earthquake -- 8 Goethe Reads the Jesuits -- 9 Chinese-German Pairings -- 10 World Literature and Goethe’s Chinese Poetry -- Bibliography -- Index