From Chinese Cosmology to English Romanticism：The Intricate Journey of a Monistic Idea

　　From Chinese Cosmology to English Romanticism explores the intricate early-modern English and European reception of the Chinese monistic idea tianren heyi or humanity’s unity with heaven via the Chinese rites controversy, the philosophical innovation of Spinoza, the transformation of English garden layout, and the poetic revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth.

　　“Yu Liu offers a groundbreaking analysis of cross-cultural exchange by exploring the influence of Chinese philosophical traditions on English art, gardening, and literature up to the Romantic period . . . A must-read for scholars interested in Anglo-Chinese relations between 1600 and 1830.”—Robert Markley, W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

　　“In this deeply learned study, Yu Liu traces a ‘relay of ideas’ that made their way from Chinese philosophy to Western Romanticism, transformed along the way in Spinoza’s thought and in theories of English landscape gardening. A tour de force of intellectual history, his book shapes a persuasive story out of disparate strands whose significance deepens when seen in a unifying perspective.”—Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

　　“A thoughtful and imaginative attempt to trace the migration of the ancient Chinese cosmological unity of heaven and humanity to seventeenth-andeighteenth-century Europe via the China Jesuits, Spinoza, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, leading to the redesign of English gardens and Romantic poetry.”—D. E. Mungello, professor of history emeritus, Baylor University

　　“In his powerfully original monograph, Yu Liu upends the all-too-familiar asymmetry of theorizing Chinese culture through a Western conceptual structure. He mounts a carefully documented and compelling argument that the ‘idea’ of the persistent Chinese organismic worldview captured in the language of ‘humanity’s unity with nature’ set its roots in the antinomian European Enlightenment thinkers as early as the complex Rites Controversy, and then spreads out as a root system through the heretical philosopher Spinoza to shape British Romanticism in all of its parts.”—Roger T. Ames, Peking University
 

List of Illustrations
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Distinct Type of Cross-cultural Interaction and Influence

Part 1. By Chance or Design: The Detectable Route of Philosophical Transmission

Chapter 1 Behind the Book Cover: The Real Fight and Legacy of the Chinese Rites Controversy
Chapter 2 The Uncanny Resemblance: A Telltale Clue to the Unusual Cosmology of Spinoza

Part 2. For Pride or Prejudice: The Hitherto Unrecognized Route of Aesthetic Transmission

Chapter 3 From Regularity to Irregularity: The Landscaping Innovation of William Kent
Chapter 4 Changing What Is Foreign into What Is Native: The Horticultural Nationalism of Horace Walpole

Part 3. To Accept or Reject: The History-Making Choices in English Romanticism

Chapter 5 The Intrigue of Both Attraction and Repulsion: Coleridge, Spinoza, and China
Chapter 6 The Inspiration of an Originally Chinese Idea: The Conceptual Innovation of Wordsworth in The Ruined Cottage

Notes
Bibliography
Index


 

作者簡介



Yu Liu（劉豫）

　　Yu Liu（劉豫）is professor of English at Niagara County Community College (SUNY). In addition to over thirty-five essays in peer-reviewed journals of literature, history, and philosophy, he is author of Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth (1999), Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (2008), and Harmonious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (2015).