"Chinese Sympathies analyzes key German literary texts by placing scholarship on early modern Chinese empires and missionaries in conjunction with German media theory from the last twenty-five years (most notably, Friedrich Kittler). Daniel Leonhard Purdy traces a connection 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."--
Chinese Sympathies examines how EuropeansGerman-speaking writers and thinkers in particularidentified 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 textstheological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cyclesChinese Sympathies traces the paths 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.
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