From Skin to Heart

Perceptions of Emotions and Bodily Sensations in Traditional Chinese Culture

edited by Paolo Santangelo

Book cover: From Skin to Heart

Extent: 332 pages

Publisher: Harrassowitz Verlag

Subjects: Asian/Pacific Studies & Religions

Series: Lun Wen - Studien zur Geistesgeschichte und Literatur in China

Series volume number: 11

Language: English

(Paperback) (Published)

(December 2006)

ISBN: 9783447054584

6.65 x 9.45 inches

Price: $82.00

Out of stock

Just like the self, sensations and emotions expressed in literature are elusive issues. Necessarily separated from living reality and yet, in a sense, a mirror of it, linguistic coding of bodily feeling and emotional feeling became subject of avid interest among scholars of historical emotion research and the history of mentality in intra- and intercultural perspectives. This volume combines eleven essays with critical discussions concerning the bidirectional network of sense perception and emotion. Exploring the theme from different angles – psychological, medical, and literary – From Skin to Heart highlights the intimate interrelationship between bodily sensations, states of mind, and the emotions from pain, illness, and self-destruction to love-sickness and self-sacrifice in early Chinese poetry and ethics and late imperial lyrics and narrative. The partly descriptive, partly analytical essays are contributions of a new wave of Continental and American sinology that, inspired by cultural studies, discourse analysis, and rhetorical analysis, offers fresh views on body and psyche as locked into and emerging from Chinese primary sources. An appendix provides additional examples of the rich linguistic material referring to phenomena of sense perception and the affective sphere and their interdependence.

  • Edited by Paolo Santangelo