Tianzhang Yuanyue: Western Images of China Studies (Volume 1 and 2)

Author: Zhou Yu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-12-01
Features: This book studies the Western image of China in the general sense of social imagination. In the history of the Western image of China spanning over seven centuries, it divides the period into two parts with the climax of the Enlightenment as the boundary. It constructs three types of utopianized Chinese images before this period and three types of systematically ideologicalized Chinese images after this period. It not only analyzes the meaning process of the generation and evolution of the Western image of China, revealing the universal, stable, and continuous cultural patterns that tend towards types or archetypes; but more importantly, it studies the image of China within the structure of Western modern spirit, exploring how the image of China, as the "other" of Western modern self, participates in constructing the experience of Western modernity, and explaining the potential motivations and intention structures behind the generation of the image of China.