Chinese Sympathies

Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe.

Analyzing key German literary texts—theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cycles—Chinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe's concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful similarities across culturally diverse literatures based on shared human experiences.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Daniel Leonhard Purdy is Professor of German Studies and Head of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of The Rise of Fashion and the author of The Tyranny of Elegance and On the Ruins of Babel.

Purdy tells us stories in which Europe has digested and incorporated Chinese culture and history and become deeply entangled with China. Anyone who is interested in transcultural history, early modern German literary and philosophical thinking in the European context, and the discourse of world literature should find this rich book indispensable.

Anyone who is interested in transcultural history, early modern German literary and philosophical thinking in the European context, and the discourse of world literature should find this rich book indispensable

Chenxi Tang, University of California, Berkeley, author of Imagining World Order:

From Marco Polo and Jesuit missionaries to Goethe's fascination with Chinese literature, this book stands out from the profusion of books on European depictions of China by focusing on media networks and the poetics of representation. A significant literary history of China in the European—particularly German—imagination, this book can also be read as a genealogy of the concept of world literature.

Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, author of Translating the World:

In this erudite, rich, and far-reaching work, Daniel Purdy decisively explains how Europe's positive image of China in the eighteenth century became one marked by profound otherness and fear. He develops a fascinating architecture of inquiry to frame and understand this transformation, intersecting the idea of sympathy with reading practices and technologies, as well as an emerging notion of world literature.