Book Review: Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China

Book Reviews--China In Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China, Michael Nylan shines light on the intellectual and cultural history of the Han period by focusing on Yang Xiong's approaches to the Classics and to writing, and on the manner in which they shaped later Han aesthetics and intellectual culture. To "recapture the sense of playfulness that superb stylists of the Han, beginning with Yang Xiong and his peers, brought to morally serious ideas about reading and classical learning" (p. 7), and to "provide a plausible explanation why Yang's particular style of assessing the distant past proved of such enduring appeal to readers over the centuries" (p. 3). [...]classical learning is mainly to be used in practical situations, in deed or in speech; teaching it to others is not its primary purpose, and far worse is using it merely to procure a career" (p. 73); and that "[t]he inestimable value of classical learning lies in the perfection with which it works upon human nature and the world at large" (p. 90).