Beyond Sinocentrism: Ethnocultural Others in Early Modern China - Hardcover

by Huili Zheng (Author)

Cambria Sinophone World Series.

This book offers the first sustained study of fictional encounters with ethnocultural others in early modern Chinese literature. Focusing on narratives from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, it examines how Chinese literati engaged with a changing world through imaginative depictions of the foreign-revealing cultural pride, anxiety, curiosity, and critique.

Bringing together literary analysis, global history, postcolonial theory, and cultural anthropology, the book challenges the common portrayal of imperial China as isolated and inward-looking. Instead, it reveals a dynamic interplay of Sinocentric confidence and openness to global knowledge in texts such as Yesou puyan and Jinghua yuan.

An important study for scholars of Chinese literature, history, and world literature, Beyond Sinocentrism sheds new light on how early modern Chinese narratives negotiated identity and power in a globalizing world. It offers a vital corrective to both Sinocentric and Eurocentric paradigms in the study of China's place in global history.