How Do We Have Eighteenth-Century Japanese Fiction? Hermeneutic Mitate, Unreadable Novels, and Tension in Translation

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

REVIEWS

From the middle decades of the eighteenth century Tang Emperor Taizong (r. 626–649) was cited in French, German, English, Italian, and Dutch books and periodicals as a universal model of good governance. This article sets out how eighteenth-century writers recognized a familiar genre in translations of medieval Chinese governance texts and discusses two prominent examples of the adaptation of Taizong’s mirror literature into comprehensive universal models of good governance. The work of Johann Gotlobb von Justi (ca. 1717–1771) shows how the translation of Chinese governance texts gave impetus to new and bold critiques of European governance and to a comparative theoretical analysis of monarchies with practical consequences for institutional and policy reform. Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) extended the earlier comparative analysis of monarchies into a historical utopian novel that offered a model for political and social reform. Even though their conceptualization and uses of translation differed, Justi and Wieland were exceptional in crafting a political treatise and a utopian mirror novel that suggested that a durable blueprint for the revival of the monarchy in Europe was available in the translation of Chinese mirror literature like Jin Jing (The Golden Mirror) or Di fan (Model for an Emperor).

Notes on Contributors

Buddhist institutions were first established in the Japanese archipelago in the 6th century ce. In the same period, the ruling families incorporated Chinese-style medicine and Daoist ritual healing techniques into Japanese culture and society. By the 8th century, Buddhism had become a dominant cultural force in Japan. The Japanese Buddhist textual tradition was shaped by translations from Sanskrit into classical Chinese, and Chinese texts remained paramount for all branches of scholarship. In the ensuing centuries, a rich and hybrid ritual, material, and intellectual culture emerged from combining these various religious and scholarly traditions, as well as elements of the local tradition of kami神 (gods) worship. This also resulted in a distinct tradition of Buddhist medicine, which blossomed in the Kamakura period (1185–1333). The esoteric (or tantric) tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism with its idea of mutual empowerment (kaji加持) and unification of the ritualist and a buddha, bodhisattva, or other Buddhist deity, directing their power to heal, protect, etc., was the prevailing paradigm. Other traditions developed over the course of the centuries, too, notably Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen Buddhism, and the vinaya restoration movement (Shingon Ritsu). These also had an impact on the ideas and practices of healing and medical care. All shared the aim of providing the means for salvation and ultimate liberation from sickness and suffering. Lay patrons in early and medieval Japan funded the construction of hospitals and other care facilities as well as medicinal gardens. The Japanese monastics who studied the classical Chinese medical texts and treated their patients following the ideal of the compassionate bodhisattva were also familiar with basic ideas from Indian Āyurveda from translated sutras and commentaries. As such, etiology and diagnosis in the Japanese Buddhist context included epistemic and cosmological thought from both China and India. In the Buddhist context, rituals such as elaborate fire-offering ceremonies (goma護摩) were commonly used to take care of patients of all ages. Buddhist treatments also included empowered medicines, acupuncture, and moxibustion. Buddhist priests provided palliative care, and deathbed rituals were conducted to protect the dying from evil forces and prepare them spiritually for a good death and future birth. Buddhist medical practitioners not only included monastic doctors, usually called sōi僧医 in modern literature, but also various kinds of exorcists and healers. These groups produced talismans and amulets, and offered protective rituals within the paradigmatic framework of Japanese Buddhism. Pilgrimage to sacred sites at Buddhist temples provided a way for monastics and lay people to find healing and support. The external treatment of afflictions often went hand in hand with internal, mental, or cognitive methods such as various forms of meditation. These methods were primarily practiced by the monastically trained, but some, such as naikan内観, “internal observation,” were practiced by a wider circle of practitioners. Buddhistic methods were also used to treat animals.

Reviews Bigelow, Gordon. Fiction, Famine, andthe Rise of Economics in Vidorian Britain andlrehnd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. pp. 229, $65.00. In Fidion, Famine, andthe Rise of Economics in Vidorian Britain andlrehnd, Gordon Bigelow offers a very idiosyncratic look at what he takes to be exemplary moments in the rise of economics — or rather, the general shift in England away from "poHtical economy" towards "economics" — during the Victorian era. The book offers this historical précis in two distinct parts: the first is a theoreticaUy informed discussion of economics as a theory of signification that, in large measure, emerges out of Adam Smith's interest in CondiUac's theories of signification. Whüe this is an interesting and counter-intuitive reading of capitaHsm, one can already sense the presence of an unconvincing equation in the first chapters of the work: "economics" and "capitaHsm" are going to become more or less interchangeable terms for Bigelow, and whüe this may seem fitting enough in his discussion of Dickens and GaskeU in part two of the book, it is clearly going to be inadequate in his discussion of the Irish famine. "CapitaHsm" might have been the grandiose term under which the system of agricultural labour and exchange was supposed to function in Ireland, but this network lacked a number of important constituent elements of capitaHsm: namely, capital, in the sense of income reinvested back into the always struggling venture of the estate. I wiU offer more on this later, but for now I want to suggest what I take to be the strengths and weaknesses of the first part of the text. In the early and more theoretical chapters of the book Bigelow offers a very strong reading of how new linguistic discoveries in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were making the hegemony of European nations seem very precarious. These discoveries revolved around Egyptian and Chinese texts, and the popular view that these languages offered "clues to a perfect form of writing" (14). Feeling some anxiety about this impHcit derogation in the status of European culture, writers like Adam Smith developed an economic doctrine-indeed, an entire world history- "that would prove financial capitaHsm to be the key to European superiority" (18). The argument is, of course, an interesting one, although the relationship between cause and effect seems unconvincing at times. For example, Bigelow offers the foUowing connection between CondiUac's linguistics and Smith economics: "For CondiUac and Smith an increasing level of Victorian Review (2004)1 13 Reviews abstraction in language yields an increased capacity for complex thought" (39). Not only is the connection vague, but it is not at aU certain that what Condillac is saying about the individual's abüity to cognize more complex psychological and linguistic material is reaUy aU that pertinent to Smith's view that society is willing to abide more complex and abstracted relationships around capital and the commodity. What both have in common is, of course, the increasing complexity of things, but other than this very unconvincing connection it is difficult to determine what Bigelow is actuaUy arguing here. Bigelow's view is, I suppose, that capitaHsm arrives on the European stage at a historical moment when society is willing and able to cognize more complex social relations, but whether this is a credible abstraction from CondiUac's theory is certainly difficult to demonstrate. For Bigelow, the discourses of linguistic interiority and economic capitaHsm merge to form the figure of the consumer; this figure comes to dominate not only Victorian economics, but Bigelow's engaged and critical appraisal of it. Despite some difficulties with the early part of the work, it is easy to see that the discussion of the history and phüosophical intertexts of capitaHsm is where Bigelow's chief interest Hes, and I wonder why this book is not simply a treatise on capitaHsm's deep structural simüarities to linguistic systems, or a treatment of capitaHsm as a phüosophical and world-historical idea that coheres around the nature of psychological and social complexity and the attendant necessity of inteUectual and moral abstraction. The insights in these chapters are sometimes difficult to demonstrate or to foUow, but they are original...

The reversion of the Chinese state, under the early Ming emperors, from private maritime shipping and trade to state-sponsored diplomatic and economic missions into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral under the Admiral Zheng He, has led to the Chinese textual documentation contains substantial information on the Sultanate of Melaka in the fifteenth century. However, this body of information, and the historical narrative of the Sultanate, has been based primarily on the extant records of the imperial Ming voyages, and the official bureaucratic records, such as the Ming shilu and Mingshi. Other texts post-dating the fifteenth century, including such encyclopedias as the Dongxi yangkao, draw their information on Melaka from these texts. The digitization of the Siku quanshu (Compendium of the Four Treasuries) commissioned in the late eighteenth century, has opened up the opportunity to discover hitherto unknown historical information, and the develop new paradigms and methodologies for the research of the history of Melaka. Importantly, the various entries of information on Melaka, found in the compendium that date after the fall of the Melaka Sultanate in 1511, provide insight into the lenses and experiences through which archivalisation, and the process in which Chinese officialdom collected information on the port-city, occurred through the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This paper utilizes digital database search processes to elucidate new aspects of the history of Melaka’s trade and economic interactions with East Asia, and how Southeast Asia ports continued to feature in the memory landscape of the Chinese officialdom, long after the ceased to exist in the form of their original polities.

Seasickness, fear of heights, and adverse effects of alcohol were the major areas where descriptions of vertigo and dizziness were found in Roman, Greek, and Chinese texts from about 730 BC-600 AD. A few detailed accounts were suggestive of specific vestibular disorders such as Menière's attacks (Huangdi Neijing, the Yellow Thearch's Classic of Internal Medicine) or vestibular migraine (Aretaeus of Cappadocia). Further, the etymological and metaphorical meanings of the terms and their symptoms provide fascinating historical insights, e.g. Vespasian's feelings of dizzy exultations when becoming Emperor (69 AD) after Nero's suicide or the figurative meaning of German "Schwindel" (vertigo) derived from English "swindle" to express "financial fraud" in the Eighteenth century. The growth of knowledge of the vestibular system and its functions began primarily in the Nineteenth century. Erasmus Darwin, however, was ahead of his times. His work Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life in 1794 described new dizziness syndromes and concepts of sensorimotor control including the mechanism of fear of heights as well as made early observations on positional alcohol vertigo. The latter is beautifully illustrated by the German poet and cartoonist Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) who also documented the alleviating effect of the "morning after drink". The mechanism underlying positional alcohol vertigo, i.e., the differential gravities of alcohol and endolymph, was discovered later in the Nineteenth century. The first textbook on neurology (Lehrbuch der Nervenkrankheiten des Menschen, 1840) by Moritz Romberg contained general descriptions of signs and symptoms of various conditions having the key symptom of vertigo, but no definition of vestibular disorders. Our current knowledge of vestibular function and disorders dates back to the seminal work of a group of Nineteenth century scientists, e.g., Jan Evangelista Purkinje, Ernst Mach, Josef Breuer, Hermann Helmholtz, and Alexander Crum-Brown.

Reviewed by: Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Jason S. Farr Jeremy Chow FARR, JASON S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. 206 pp. $99.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 e-book. With his recent monograph, Jason S. Farr showcases the constellated nature of disability and sexuality in the literature of the long eighteenth century by emphasizing, one, how this intersectional lens has been heretofore limited in extant scholarship and, two, how eighteenth-century writers implicitly and explicitly gesture towards their layered integration. Novel Bodies bridges the established fields of eighteenth-century disability studies and queer studies, which have—until recently—been conducted separately, to become an astute model for intertwining theories of disability and sexuality. Farr argues that eighteenth-century conceptions of disability plague the formation of subjectivity (by Locke’s definition at least) and that the literature of the period encodes “disability as a manifestation of queer desire” (27). In so doing, Farr embarks upon crip-queer/queer-crip readings that can enrich eighteenth-century studies and its continued investment in elucidating marginalized representation within the canon and beyond. The two-word title, Novel Bodies, lays bare Farr’s bipartite goals. First, by way of tackling theories of embodiment, Farr engages the lived realities of disability and sexuality as they “stage an array of eighteenth-century debates covering contemporaneous topics as diverse as education, feminism, kinship, medicine, and plantation life” (1). And second, with his pun on “novel,” Farr excitingly reads the [End Page 346] eighteenth-century novel as a literary form that replicates disability and ableist politics and representation within its very narrative structure. Novel Bodies thus innovatively envisions what I will call “crip-formalism” (crip, of course, a word that has been recently recuperated by disability theorists and disabled individuals) that extends from recent explorations of new-formalism and queer formalism: necessary revisions of staid formalist approaches so as to center literary form as it uncovers historically and culturally situated political, social, and identity-based significance. Farr’s crip-formalism opens realms by which culturally-inscribed and institutionalized attitudes towards and descriptions of disability are framed by narrative form, and thus positions the novel as a structural mirror to “various kinds of disability… vital to the social, physical, and psychological makeup of Georgian Britain” (27). By focusing primarily on the emergence of the novel in the period (Richardson, Haywood, Smollett, Scott), Farr’s crip-formalism navigates a parallel track by which to understand the rise of the novel discourse that has long been heralded as integral to understanding the eighteenth century. Farr’s take plaits identity and embodiment with form. Four chapters and a coda comprise Novel Bodies, which moves chronologically from 1720 to 1817, though Farr draws from Restoration-era (Rochester, Wycherley) and earlier seventeenth-century primary sources (Bulwer, Bacon) by which to historicize his claims of disability or “deformity”—the latter a more analogous term for the eighteenth century. The introduction adumbrates the theoretical territory and offers a reading of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto as a litmus test that realizes one of Farr’s most provocative close readings: Conrad, presumed and murdered heir to the Otranto throne, as a “crip haunting of heteronormativity” (18). The introduction patiently traces the evolution of disability, deformity, degenerescence, sound-ness, and other critical terms that valuably lay out the provenance of eighteenth-century disability studies. However, I wish this same patient attention was paid to “queerness” or “queer”—terms that alongside disability and crip share parallel recuperative, reparative, and weaponized histories. Farr’s capacious use of queerness signifies interventions in sexuality, gender, and sex. Chapter 1 addresses the social deaths and histories of deaf subjectivity in Enlightenment Britain by examining three representations of Duncan Campbell—a celebrity deaf prophet feted for his divination talents—by Christopher Krentz, Eliza Haywood, and allegedly Campbell himself. Farr’s visual analysis of the frontispiece to John Bulwer’s Philocophus, or, the deafe and dumbe man’s friend (1648), which is likewise captured on the cover of Novel Bodies, emblematizes his lamination of disability and queer close readings. Chapter 2 pairs Samuel Richardson...

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

Café Space, Communication, Creativity, and Materialism

Vol. 6, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1985 MATERIALS ON MANCHURIA, INNER ASIA, AND CHINA HELD AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY William T. Rowe* The Johns Hopkins University is not a major East Asian research center, and consequently its Milton S. Eisenhower Library contains no comprehensive collection of materials in East Asian languages. However , through such former faculty members as Paul Linebarger, Owen Lattimore, and Richard Pfeffer, a number of scattered bodies of material in Asian laguages or on Asian subjects have found their way into the Library's possession. One unique resource, for example, is a collection in the University Archives of the correspondence of Frank Goodnow, former President of Johns Hopkins and constitutional advisor to the Republic of China under Yuan Shikai. Of more general interest are two collections of items in various languages relating largely, but not exclusively, to the history of China's northeast and inner Asian borderlands and peoples. Some of this material appears to my non-specialist eye to be quite rare; a few volumes may even be unique to this collection . I. The Hauer Collection The personal library of Dr. Erich Hauer, a sinologist and expert on the Manchu and Mongol languages at the University of Berlin, was purchased by Johns Hopkins after Dr. Hauer's death in 1939. Approximately six hundred volumes in various Western languages were subsequently merged into the Eisenhower Library's general collection, where they remain. However, some 393 volumes in Chinese, Mongol, and Manchu were never placed in the general collection, although a detailed inventory of them was accomplished in 1945. In addition to a variety of "I am grateful to Pierre Berry. Janette Cabeen, and James Walton of the M. S. Eisenhower Library, and to Professor David Farquhar of the University of California-Los Angeles for assistance necessary to preparing this note. 108 Materials on Manchuria, Inner Asia, and China109 miscellaneous items, this collection includes: 1.Several cord-bound Manchu-language works from the early Qing. Examples include Renchen jingxin Iu -^- S tfk. '& -fefc (Treatise concerning the proper conduct of officials and subjects), 1656, and Quanshan yaoyan $fl 4r£c% (Moral exhortations to the people), 1656, both attributed to the Shunzhi emperor; and the Yongzheng emperor's Shangyu qiwu yifu * i£j #£ jfc íj¡{ ejf^ (Edicts on banner affairs, with responding memorials), n.d. 2.Approximately eighty Chinese-language historical and geographical works published from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Example: Menggu yuanliu ¡fa % j$ >3L(Origin of the Mongols), Chinese translation by Lu Xixiong f£ £^ ft and Ji Yun fa i% from Mongol original, 1777. 3.Several bound runs of Beijing newspapers from the early twentieth century. Examples: Jinghua ribao -^f. %% $ £fk (August 1904June 1905), Mengwenbao ffi 5^-^ (April 1915-January 1916). 4.Translations of the Chinese classics and Chinese literature into Manchu and Mongol. 5.More than one hundred dictionaries and languages texts in Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese, several dating from the eighteenth century. II. The Lattimore Collection When Professor Owen Lattimore left Johns Hopkins for Leeds University in the late 1950s, he gave the Library several hundred volumes from his personal collection. This material was never inventoried by the Library, but I have recently had the opportunity to do so. The collection closely reflects Professor Lattimore's research interests, and includes the following types of materials: 1 . Chinese cord-bound geographical works and travel accounts on frontier areas, dating from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Examples: Xiyu wenjian Iu ¦&} *£{)§& -i^i (A record of things seen and heard in the Western regions), by Chun Yuan -Jf^ j|| , 1777; Xijiang zashushi F $%. -Zfc sí. ¦%% 110William T. Rowe (Collected prose and poetry from the Western borderlands), by Xiao Xiongquan £ f ^ß) ¿3 -^. , Yuanchao jielu ?* £f[ *A. 4fÈ$ ¦») 1$ & Ü *T $. ^1 (Collected material on Manchuria) Xinjing, 1939. 5.A small number of cord-bound and paperbound volumes in Manchu and Mongol, primarily dictionaries and language texts. While the M. S. Eisenhower Library has recently begun the task of fully cataloguing these two collections, this process will take some time. In the interim, scholars interested in information on particular titles or wishing to arrange access to these materials are invited to contact me, in care of the Department...

Reviews

Emergence of the concept of endocrine function and endocrinology

At some point during eighteenth century, cultural climate in England was right for novel to begin its rise to a prominent position in hierarchy of genres. The same conditions also made it possible for women's lore, taste, judgement, feeling and words to become, for first time in history, fit matter for literature. Despite scholarly attention that has been devoted to each of these groundbreaking events, there remains obvious question of what one literary phenomenon had to do with other, or how together they participated in a larger cultural change. It is Ian Watt's well-known contention that popularity of such writers as Defoe and Richardson-and subsequent rise of noveldepended on economic individualism and Puritan ethic they shared with a substantial portion of new reading public. But as his study of eighteenthcentury novel comes to a close, Watt seems to realize that a notion of literary production based on shared social values and inside knowledge of commercial life fails to explain the majority of eighteenth-century novels, namely, those written by women.1 To account for conspicuous appearance of a woman writer on literary scene, he falls back on a nineteenth-century commonplace and, speaking of Jane Austen, claims, the feminine sensibility was in some ways better equipped to reveal intricacies of personal relationships and was therefore at a real advantage in realm of novel. 2 Surely this will not do as explanation for why women gained authority to write literature and have it received as both female and literary, nor does it indicate why female literary authority coincided with emergence of novel as a literary form. Lest we dismiss Watt's theory too quickly, we should note that feminist critics also have difficulty in correlating social and literary changes that occurred during late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Watt's theory of text as a reflection of socio-economic interests on part of new middle classes derives from his study of readership and conditions for literary reception. In contrast, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's definitive study of nineteenth-century women novelists concentrates on authors and conditions in which their works were produced. On this basis, they argue that author's sex is far more important than class affiliation, nationality, or matters of personality.3 Since so many novelists were women by fact of nature, and since