Confucius and the Analects Revisited: New Perspectives on Composition, Dating, and Authorship

Editors:
Michael Hunter and Martin Kern

Publication date:
October 2018 

Publisher:
Brill

Abstract:

Edited by Michael Hunter and Martin Kern and featuring contributions by preeminent scholars of early China, Confucius and the Analects Revisited: New Perspectives on Composition, Dating, and Authorship critically examines the long-standing debates surrounding the history of the Analects, for two millennia considered the most authoritative source of the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BCE). Unlike most previous scholarship, it does not take the traditional view of the Analects’ origins as given. Instead, it explores the validity and the implications of recent revisionist critiques from historical, philosophical, and literary perspectives, and further draws on recently discovered ancient manuscripts and new technological advances in the Digital Humanities. As such, it opens up new ways for productive engagement with the text. 

Table of Contents:

Introduction
 Michael Hunter and Martin Kern

1 A Critical Overview of Some Contemporary Chinese Perspectives on the Composition and Date of Lunyu
 John Makeham

2 The Lunyu as an Accretion Text
 Robert Eno

3 The Lunyu as Western Han Text
 Michael Hunter

4 Confucius and His Disciples in the Lunyu: The Basis for the Traditional View
 Paul R. Goldin

5 The Lunyu, a Homeless Dog in Intellectual History: On the Dating of Discourses on Confucius’s Success and Failure
 Joachim Gentz

6 Confucius’s Sayings Entombed: On Two Han Dynasty Bamboo Lunyu Manuscripts
 Paul van Els

7 Manuscript Formats and Textual Structure in Early China
 Matthias L. Richter

8 Interlocutor Collections, the Lunyu, and Proto-Lunyu Texts
 Mark Csikszentmihalyi

9 Sima Qian’s Kongzi and the Western Han Lunyu
 Esther Klein

10 Kongzi as Author in the Han
 Martin Kern