Literary Information in China: A History [Hardback]

This impressive volume provides a comprehensive and wonderfully detailed account of the mechanisms of textual organization, replication, proliferation, and dissemination from ancient China to the age of the internet. From the zi and graphs to the making of anthologies, encyclopedias, archives, histories, and so on, the authors collectively bring the enduring infrastructure of the literary (wen) to light. -- Lydia H. Liu, author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious This is a wonderful and magisterial effort of editing, writing, and thinkingastonishing in the breadth of its coverage and in the depth of its scholarship. Together these essays provide an enormous step forward in our understanding of the ways information, literature, and culture work together to create the landscape of our communicative lives. -- Eric Hayot, author of Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan This extensive collection of first-rate essays is an impressive exploration of the history, range, and significance of Chinese literary production. From the beginnings of the complex Chinese writing system to contemporary methods and forms of textual composition and preservation, contributors present a scholarly tour de force: unmissable reading for anyone interested in one of the worlds most important textual traditions. -- Elaine Treharne, author of Text Technologies: A History Literary Information in China breaks new ground in Chinese studies. This book is bound to generate new dialogues between Chinese cultural history and linguistics, library science, museum studies, digital humanities, and big data. The collection will become an indispensable reference for scholars of Chinese studies. -- Ning Ma, author of The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West This compilation richly deserves wide attention; it seems destined to inspire, or perhaps to provoke, a wave of new research using its insights. -- Robert E. Hegel * Journal of Chinese Studies * An ambitious undertaking. It amounts to no less than an attempt to reconstruct Sinology from the ground up. -- Victor H. Mair * Modern Chinese Literature and Culture * An important contribution and recommended to all with an interest in historicizing contemporary politics of information. -- Laura Skouvig * Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology * An impressive accumulation of material and reflections on how different kinds of information were and are still dealt with in various types of texts in the Chinese world. -- Marie Bizais-Lillig * Journal of the American Oriental Society *