Eric Reinders
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520241718
- eISBN:
- 9780520931084
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520241718.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters ...
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To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of this book, which looks at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. The book first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. It then explores Western views of the Chinese language, especially ritual language, and Chinese ritual, particularly the kowtow. This work offers surprising and valuable insight into the visceral nature of the Victorian response to the Chinese—and, more generally, into the nineteenth-century Western representation of China.Less
To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of this book, which looks at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. The book first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. It then explores Western views of the Chinese language, especially ritual language, and Chinese ritual, particularly the kowtow. This work offers surprising and valuable insight into the visceral nature of the Victorian response to the Chinese—and, more generally, into the nineteenth-century Western representation of China.
Eric Reinders
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520241718
- eISBN:
- 9780520931084
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520241718.003.0014
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This chapter comments on Western missionaries' accounts of China and its people. It explains that though individual Chinese were described in positive terms, especially if they were converted, China ...
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This chapter comments on Western missionaries' accounts of China and its people. It explains that though individual Chinese were described in positive terms, especially if they were converted, China as a whole was considered relentlessly dark, wicked, and irrational. It provides evidence against missionaries' criticisms on the inability of the Chinese to verbally articulate any reasoning for their religious practice, idolatry, and kowtow.Less
This chapter comments on Western missionaries' accounts of China and its people. It explains that though individual Chinese were described in positive terms, especially if they were converted, China as a whole was considered relentlessly dark, wicked, and irrational. It provides evidence against missionaries' criticisms on the inability of the Chinese to verbally articulate any reasoning for their religious practice, idolatry, and kowtow.
Evgeny Dobrenko
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780300198478
- eISBN:
- 9780300252842
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300198478.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
This chapter analyzes how the masses' and individual's experience were refashioned, and the view of the world was structured in postwar Soviet art. It describes the complexes and traumas of the ...
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This chapter analyzes how the masses' and individual's experience were refashioned, and the view of the world was structured in postwar Soviet art. It describes the complexes and traumas of the nation that emerged after the war, its worries and phobias, illusions, and the conceptions of its own greatness and messianic role that were all harmonized into the Soviet nation. It also assesses the principle of verisimilitude as the stylistic shape of realism. The chapter discusses the real-life experience of war that presented various reasons in being a substantial threat to the Stalinist Regime and subject to transformation and substitution. It narrates the experience of contact with the West that was transformed into a simulation of inferiority complex called “kowtowing.”Less
This chapter analyzes how the masses' and individual's experience were refashioned, and the view of the world was structured in postwar Soviet art. It describes the complexes and traumas of the nation that emerged after the war, its worries and phobias, illusions, and the conceptions of its own greatness and messianic role that were all harmonized into the Soviet nation. It also assesses the principle of verisimilitude as the stylistic shape of realism. The chapter discusses the real-life experience of war that presented various reasons in being a substantial threat to the Stalinist Regime and subject to transformation and substitution. It narrates the experience of contact with the West that was transformed into a simulation of inferiority complex called “kowtowing.”
