The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China Book

This groundbreaking book argues that in the Qin-Han period, there arose in China a regime of textual authority-one that overlapped but did not coincide with imperial authority. Drawing on a wide range of research and theory, Connery makes an original contribution to the analysis of early imperial elite culture, particularly in the fields of literature and linguistics, intellectual, and institutional history. The author provides new contexts for thinking about canonization and textual transmission systems, an innovative framework for analysis and discussion of the early imperial elite, a socio-ideological exploration of one strand of late Han "Confucian" thought, and a critique of the concepts of subjectivity and the "birth of lyricism" in China. His original perspective on new and old issues in the field will be of keen interest to comparativists in Western studies as well as those in the China field, both modern and pre-modern.Read More