This book argues that the most profound and far-reaching effects of Buddhism on Chinese culture occurred at the level of practice, specifically in religious rituals designed to cure people of disease, demonic possession, and bad luck. This practice would leave its most lasting imprint on the liturgical tradition of Taoism. In focusing on religious practice, the book provides a corrective to traditional studies of Chinese religion, which overemphasize metaphysics and spirituality.

Focusing on oracular texts, Chinese Poetry and Prophecy examines the role of divination in Chinese culture, particularly in religious practice. Drawing on a dazzling array of ancient and modern sources, the author establishes the oracular sequence of important but obscure works in his celebrated engaging style. This is the second posthumous work of Michel Strickmann to be to be edited by Bernard Faure for publication by Stanford University Press.

"This is the best study of a single Chinese poet I have seen in decades. And the best study of Du Fu known to me. David Schneider goes beyond previous works in revealing what might be called the source of Du Fu's gravitas. What is especially refreshing is that the author, while making use of well-selected modern authorities to cast light on Du Fu's poetry, is equally careful never to embrace their "theories" fully, with the ancillary danger of anachronism which taints so much contemporary "humanities" scholarship. The combination of empathy and critical thinking here is exemplary. The author writes eloquently and clearly, and is a very fine translator indeed, and gives us some of the very finest translations of Du Fu we now possess." - Jonathan Chaves, George Washington University

The first book that systematically explores the manifold aspects of divination and prognostication in traditional and modern China.

Cultural Studies. Poetry. Yunte Huang's SHI: A RADICAL READING OF CHINESE POETRY is as much a bow to traditions of poetics across cultures as it is to linguistic efforts to bridge them. Huang concerns himself with the very act and implicative force of translation, especially when crossing gap in time and geography from classical Chinese poetry to the audience of the contemporary Anglophone West. His effort is described as "halfway between a hermeneutical cartography and a translation...to test and expand the reader's horizon of expectation"--Wai-Lim Yip. "Yunte Huang transforms our sense of 'Chineseness' by replacing the Orientalized scenic and stylistic tropes of traditional translations with multilivel encounters with the Chinese language"--Charles Bernstein.

Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World explores the idea of literary history across the long span of the Chinese tradition. Although much scholarship on Chinese literature may be characterized as doing the work of literary history, there has been little theoretical engagement with received literary historical categories and assumptions, with how literary historical judgments are formed, and with what it means to do literary history in the first place. The present collection of essays addresses these questions from perspectives emerging both from within the tradition and from without, examining the anthological histories that shape the concept of a particular genre, the interpretive positions that impel our aesthetic judgments, the conceptual categories that determine how literary history is framed, and the history of literary historiography itself. As such, the essays collectively consider what it means to think through the framework of literary history, what literary history affords or omits, and what needs to be theorized in terms of literary history’s constraints and possibilities.

Drawing on avant-garde traditions of Europe and the United States as well as on the traditions of classical Chinese poetry and prose, his work explores intense sensuality, the anguish of war, exile, the colonial experience, and conflicting views of national and cultural identity.