David B Honey 
A History of Chinese Classical Scholarship, Volume II 
Qin, Han, Wei, Jin

Volume II of David M. Honey’s comprehensive history of Chinese thought covers a vital 500-year stretch in China’s history, from national unification in 221 BCE to the first post-imperial fragmentation into rival northern and southern polities. This volume discusses the reconstitution of the classics after the textual devastation wrought by the policies of the First Emperor of Qin, who destroyed many of them, and their eventual canonization by the crown during the Western Han period. Honey also examines the professionalization of Chinese classical scholarship as a state-sponsored enterprise, whereby private masters gave way to tenured academicians who specialized in single classical works. This volume also covers the development of various subgenres in the discipline of philology by the three great Eastern Han classicists Liu Xiang in textual criticism, Xu Shen in lexicography, and the polymath Zheng Xuan in the exegesis of virtually all the classics. Honey concludes with an examination of Zheng Xuan as the inspiration for other exegetical modes to explain textual complexities following this era.

A propos de l’auteur

David B. Honey was born in El Paso Texas, but grew up in Southern California. Graduating from UCLA in 1980, he earned his MA (1984) and Ph D (1988) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1987, he has taught classical Chinese and Chinese literature at Brigham Young University where he was honored as the Humanities Professor of Chinese from 2020 through 2022. His major publications reflect variegated research interests. The Rise of the Medieval Hsiung-nu: The Biography of Liu Yuan (1990), Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology (2001), a work composed in Chinese, Xifang jingxueshi gailun 西方經學史概論 (A Short History of Classical Scholarship in the West) (2012), and The Southern Garden Poetry Society: Literary Culture and Social Memory in Guangdong (2013) all represent these ancillary interests. A Chinese translation of Incense at the Altar is currently in press. Professor Honey’s main research commitment is represented by this publication of the first three volumes of a projected five-volume set titled A History of Chinese Classical Scholarship. Vols. one (2018) and two (2019) have appeared in Chinese translation by Social Sciences Academic Press, Beijing.