Historical Chinese Letter Writing - Paperback

by Daniel Z. Kadar (Author)

Dániel Z. Kádár was awarded with the Academy Award for Young Outstanding Scholars by
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for this book.

Letter writing is a pivotal yet neglected medium of historical Chinese communication. The epistolary format is key to sinological research. As historical letters have a specific vocabulary and rhetorical structure it is difficult to read them without the supporting apparatus of specialised study.

This compendium fills the gap in Chinese studies by providing a bilingual Chinese-English edition of a corpus of Chinese letters, prepared for advanced students of Classical Chinese as well as academics with an interest in historical Chinese epistolary art. The book has a broad and general introduction, systematically constructed vocabulary sections as well as detailed grammatical and philological explanations.

It focuses on Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) letter writing, a high point of pre-1911 epistolary activity in Chinese, and will appeal to Chinese scholars and Sinologists at a broad range of academic levels.

Author Biography

Dániel Z. Kádár is a Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary.He is winner of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Young Scholar Award 2010.