PERCY, Thomas.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese. First edition, including the first appearance of the author's "Dissertation on the Language and Characters of the Chinese", the ideas of which fed into his monumental Reliques of Ancient English Poetry published three years later. "The origins and development of British Romantic Sinology in Percy's Chinese writings is closely associated with the emergence of the literary aesthetic we know as Romanticism" (Kitson, p. 32).In his essay, Percy argues that "Chinese culture is dialogically related to English culture, as he understands it in the Reliques, by virtue of the formality and antiquity of its social and political forms and the barbarity and backwardness of its literature, in which oral speech and written language are radically disjunct. In the Miscellaneous Pieces, Percy develops a theory of the Chinese language, to paraphrase Min, divided between an underdeveloped orality and an overdeveloped script, a problem rooted in the pictorial, hieroglyphic nature of Chinese signs, which is indicative of primitive societies but inadequate to meet the needs of more advanced, civilized societies... the Reliques consciously aims to transcend the gap between oral and written language that Percy highlights in Chinese culture" (Clingham, p. 209).Besides his own contribution, Percy's anthology includes William Chambers's "On the Art of Laying out Gardens Among the Chinese" (first published in 1757), as well as translations of writings original

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