Disease And Humanity: Ba Jin And His Ward Four: A Wartime Novel Of China

Family as Ba Jin’s intense concern seems to be a central icon of his literary works, carrying through from his Family (1933) to Cold Nights (1947). After briefly reassessing Ba Jin’s literary contribution in his early phase, this essay will focus more on Ba Jin’s novels written in the 1940s, particularly his Ward Four, which rarely attracts critical attention. For Lu Xun, mental disease in China was more crucial than physical disease. Ba Jin uses both mental and physical diseases to explore humanity in a wartime hospital. Ba Jin’s early novels were infused with more radical ideas, but as a more mature writer in the 1940s he provided readers with a new perspective to explore and understand society

Hidden Spoor, Ruan Xiaoxu, And His Treatise On Reclusion

In early medieval China great attention was paid to compiling accounts of men in reclusion, yet the prefaces to these compilations often contain only vague or stale reasoning concerning the nature of reclusion itself. A preface by Shen Yue (441-513) is a notable exception: Shen differentiated between disengagement and reclusion. A slightly later contemporary of Shen, Ruan Xiaoxu (479-536), took issue with him in a unique and tightly constructed disquisition on what Ruan saw as a basic dichotomy in the Way of man: the root and overt traces. Ruan\u27s overlooked treatise is examined here, as are some relevant facets of his life

Topos And Entelechy In The Ethos Of Reclusion In China

While the topos of reclusion was ubiquitous in the scholar-official culture of traditional China, there was already in medieval sources a discernible differentiation between essentiality and semblance, between bona fide men in reclusion and men who took office, between reclusion per se and its synthetic translation into the political, intellectual, and literary repertoire of the scholar-official. Men recognized as having practiced reclusion as a way of life categorically eschewed official appointments. Many scholar-officials espoused precepts ordinarily associated with reclusion, but on an occasional or purely noetic basis; their conduct, rationale, and writings evince the entrenchment of topoi of reclusion within the scholar-official ethos, but do not evince the ethos of reclusion

Reclusion And The Chinese Eremitic Tradition

Aat Vervoorn\u27s Men of the Cliffs and Caves is a groundbreaking study of attitudes held by the scholar-official class concerning the issue of service vis-à-vis reclusion, retirement, and withdrawal. Written primarily in terms of the perspectives of the individual and the ruler, it focuses on the intellectual and political aspects of withdrawal. It treats the eremitic tradition, but fails to distinguish between the practice of reclusion and reclusion in the abstract, between men in reclusion and scholar-officials. Thus, even while duly treating men in reclusion and topoi of reclusion, the study really is of a much broader and more pervasive topic: the development of political and intellectual notions about withdrawal in the scholar-official culture of China through the Han