TY - BOOK ID - 77881284 TI - Imagining harmony PY - 2011 SN - 0804776393 9780804776394 9780804761574 0804761574 PB - Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press DB - UniCat KW - Japanese poetry KW - Literature and society KW - Nativism in literature. KW - Culture in literature. KW - Philosophy, Confucian. KW - Confucian philosophy KW - Confucianism KW - Philosophy, Chinese KW - Literature KW - Literature and sociology KW - Society and literature KW - Sociology and literature KW - Sociolinguistics KW - Japanese poetry (Collections) KW - Japanese literature KW - History and criticism KW - Theory, etc. KW - History KW - Social aspects UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77881284 AB - Many 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. This study contends that the literary thought of these figures needs to be understood not just for what it has to say about the composition of poetry but as a form of political and philosophical discourse. Unlike other scholars of this literature, Peter Flueckiger argues that the increased valorization of human emotions in eighteenth-century literary thought went hand in hand with new demands for how emotions were to be regulated and socialized, and that literary and political thought of the time were thus not at odds but inextricably linked. ER -