Imagining Harmony - 9780804761574

Imagining HarmonyPoetry, Empathy, and Community in Mid-Tokugawa Confucianism and Nativism\nAuthor(s): Peter Flueckiger\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Stanford University Press, United States\nImprint: Stanford University Press\nISBN-13: 9780804761574, 978-0804761574\nSynopsis\nMany intellectuals in eighteenth-century Japan valued classical poetry in either Chinese or Japanese for its expression of unadulterated human sentiments. They also saw such poetry as a distillation of the language and aesthetic values of ancient China and Japan, which offered models of the good government and social harmony lacking in their time. By studying the poetry of the past and composing new poetry emulating its style, they believed it possible to reform their own society. Imagining Harmony focuses on the development of these ideas in the life and work of Ogyu Sorai, the most influential Confucian philosopher of the eighteenth century, and that of his key disciples and critics.\n\n This study contends th.