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CHINA Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties. Edited by ZONG-QI CAI. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. vii, 359 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
The period from the latter part of the second through the sixth centuries produced many features of what would later be viewed as timelessly "classical" Chinese culture. In arts and letters, the system of "high" literary genres and the first explicit theories of literary composition and appreciation, the sense of painting and calligraphy as "high" art forms in their own right, and the rise of landscape as a focus of artistic and spiritual reflection all date from this period. Broader cultural developments that shaped subsequent Chinese aesthetic thought include the rise of Chinese Buddhism and religious Daoism, as well as many of the basic repertoires of social and political behavior that we now think of as typifying the "literati" class. Readers seeking to trace some of the interconnections between these diverse developments-or specialists interested in an overview of recent work-will be grateful to Zong-qi Cai for assembling the impressive team of scholars who produced this volume.
The term "aesthetic" generally implies the suspension of practical interestedness, along with a devaluation of abstract conceptual thought in favor...