Author: michaelnylan

The Five Classics associated with Confucius formed the core curriculum in the education of Chinese literati throughout most of the imperial period. In this book Michael Nylan offers a sweeping assessment of these ancient texts and shows how their influence spread across East Asia. Nylan begins by tracing the formation of the Five Classics canon in the pre-Han and Han periods, 206 B.C. to A.D. … 220, revising standard views on the topic. She assesses the impact on this canon of the invention of a rival corpus, The Four Books, in the twelfth century. She then analyses each of the…