Zuozhuan (Zuo Tradition) is the foundational text of Chinese historiography and the largest text from preimperial China. For two millennia, its immense complexity has given rise to countless controversies, with scholars debating its nature, time of composition, and historical reliability.
In the present volume—the first of its kind in any Western language—leading scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Rome approach Zuozhuan from multi-faceted perspectives to examine in detail Zuozhuan’s sources, narrative patterns, and meta-narrative devices; analyze the text in dialogue with other ancient Chinese works; and open it to the comparative study with ancient Greek and Roman historiography.
Contributors are: Chen Minzhen, Stephen Durrant, Joachim Gentz, Martin Kern, Wai-yee Li, Nino Luraghi, Ellen O’Gorman, Yuri Pines, David Schaberg, and Kai Vogelsang.
Yuri Pines, Ph.D. (1998), is the Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published widely on early Chinese history, political thought, and historiography, including Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Martin Kern, Ph.D. (1996), is the Joanna and Greg ’84 P13 P18 Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies at Princeton. His numerous publications cut across all genres of Chinese literature, historiography, and thought from the first millennium BCE.
Nino Luraghi, Ph.D. (1992), is the Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on ancient Greek history and historiography. His monographs include The Ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
students and scholars interested in early China, Chinese historiography, classical Chinese literature, and comparative historiography.