An annotated collection of essential texts written by European observers from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Ideas of Chinese Gardens chronicles the evolution of Western perceptions of gardens of China, from curiosity to admiration and ultimately to rejection, echoing the changes in European attitudes toward China.

There are many books published in English on Chinese gardens, but the majority are primarily picture books with little informative content. With a large number of illustrations of Chinese gardens, ancient paintings, block prints, and other artefacts, this book is a social history of Chinese gardens and focuses on how gardens have functioned and been used in Chinese society through the ages. Apart from the aesthetic or philosophical aspects of Chinese gardens, you may see how gardens functioned as real estate, how they gave opportunities of employment to skilled artisans, how they opened up outdoor space to both elite and lower-class women, how they allowed men of different social classes and of different ethnicities to interact and gain mutual benefit: in short, how the existence of gardens exerted an influence on society as a whole. At the same time, the reader can find how the wider society, and even socio-economic changes beyond China's own borders, had an impact on how gardens in China developed.

Originally published in 1948. In the first essay of this collection, Lovejoy reflects on the nature, methods, and difficulties of the historiography of ideas. He maps out recurring phenomena in the history of ideas, which the essays illustrate. One phenomenon is the presence and influence of the same presuppositions or other operative "ideas" in very diverse provinces of thought and in different periods. Another is the role of semantic transitions and confusions, of shifts and of ambiguities in the meanings of terms, in the history of thought and taste. A third phenomenon is the internal tensions or waverings in the mind of almost every individual writer—sometimes discernible even in a single writing or on a single page—arising from conflicting ideas or incongruous propensities of feeling or taste to which the writer is susceptible. These essays do not contribute to metaphysical and epistemological questions; they are primarily historical.

The Vision of China is the first book on China as it came to be reflected in English literature. As such, it also offers the first comprehensive study of the image of China in Western literature. Featuring essays by prominent Chinese scholars such as Qian Zongshu, Fan Cunzhong, and Chen Shouyi, it complements such works as Pierre Martino's L'Orient dans la litterature francaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (1906), Ursula Aurich's China im Spiegel der deutschen Literature des 18. Jahrhunderts (1935), and E. Horst Tscharner's China in der deutschen Dichtung bis zur Klassik (1939).Together with William W. Appleton's A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the 17th and 18th Centuries (1951) and Raymond Dawson's The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (1967), the book studies the last phase of the Chinese mode in England. Some of the articles collected here actually inspired Appleton's study, at least in part.As a contemporary volume on the construct of China, The Vision of China can readily be considered the companion study to Edward Said's envisioned Orient in Orientalism (1979), to Tzvetan Todorov's Africa in Nous et les autres: la reflection francaise sur la diversite humaine (1989), and Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989).

This is an in-depth study of the intellectual, technical, and artistic encounters between Europe and China in the late eighteenth century, focusing on the purposeful acquisition of information and images that characterized a direct engagement with the idea of "China." The central figure in this story is Henri-Léonard Bertin (1720–1792), who served as a minister of state under Louis XV and, briefly, Louis XVI. Both his official position and personal passion for all things Chinese placed him at the center of intersecting networks of like-minded individuals who shared his ideal vision of China as a nation from which France had much to learn. John Finlay examines a fascinating episode in the rich history of cross-cultural exchange between China and Europe in the early modern period, and this book will be an important and timely contribution to a very current discussion about Sino-French cultural relations. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, European and Chinese history.

This volume explores the concept of "spatial transparency"; a form of spatial continuity that articulates depth through permeable, layered, or porous three-dimensional organizations where interstitial light is present. Although transparency is a concept largely associated with the modern movement, the use of glazed components, and twentieth-century architectural discourse, spatial transparency is a form of depth awareness through intermediate domains, takes place through the interstitial fabric of a structure, and occurs when several consecutive domains are spatially and visually connected. These immersive environments invite active participation, not as one-way communication but as a series of visual and experiential exchanges, interdependencies, and relationships. Divided into four parts, the book examines spatial transparency in massive opaque constructions, light constructions, glass assemblies, and hybrid systems. It analyzes both the phenomenon of visual connectivity and continuity through intermediate spaces, and spatial transparency’s capacity for promoting and enabling graded, interflowing environmental transactions. Using historical and contemporary examples, it catalogs some of the most common and recurring configurations that manifest these characteristics. Over 20 international case studies from the Americas to Japan are presented to argue that environments exist in porous mediums and that by studying the openings, voids, light, and materials of layered and/or permeable organizations, important insights about space making can be revealed. Written for students and academics, this book explores various expressions of spatial transparency in architecture and helps connect their abstract ideas with significant built works, analytical drawings, and comparison charts.

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on acoustics around 1800. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 25 features a special section on acoustics around 1800, edited by Mary Helen Dupree, which includes, among others, contributionson sound and listening in Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (Robert Ryder) and on the role of the tympanum in Herder's aesthetic theory (Tyler Whitney). The volume also contains essays on Goethe and stage sequels(Matthew Birkhold), on figures of armament in eighteenth-century German drama (Susanne Fuchs), on the dialectics of Bildung in Wilhelm Meister (Galia Benziman), on the Gothic motif in Goethe's Faust and "Von deutscher Baukunst" (Jessica Resvick), on Goethe and Salomon Maimon (Jason Yonover), on Goethe's "Novelle" (Ehrhard Bahr), and on Schiller's Bürger critique (Hans Richard Brittnacher). Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Galia Benziman, Matthew H. Birkhold, Hans Richard Brittnacher, Linda Dietrick, Mary Helen Dupree, Susanne Fuchs, Deva Kemmis, Jessica C. Resvick, Robert Ryder, Patricia Anne Simpson, Chenxi Tang, Tyler Whitney, Jason Yonover, Chunjie Zhang. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford University. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis.

The essays in this volume explore the broad range of ideas about nature reflected in twentieth-century concepts of natural gardens and their ideological implications. They also investigate garden designers' use of earlier ideas of natural gardens and their relationship to the rich model that nature offers.

Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Getty Research Institute, Nov. 6, 2007 to Feb. 10, 2008.

The volume Gardens of Madeira – Gardens of the World. Contemporary Approaches displays present tendencies in calling upon the idea of gardens, being a wide-range approach to their literary, sociological and cultural representations. The book`s four parts: “Madeira: A Garden in the Sea?”, “Gardens as Temporal and Spatial Category. Cultural and Literary Approaches”, “Gardens as an Expression. Socio-cultural Perspectives” and “Re-Creating the Archetypal Garden – Discourses and Practices” refer to vast geographical and cultural areas, starting with the very complex sample of the overseas-yet-European Island of Madeira, and then joining the exemplification material from historical and contemporary European communities (with some luso-centric accents), including examples from the less known Slavonic and Eastern European countries. Those European issues are confronted with various non-European societies such as from Africa, Asia, and both Americas. Gardens evoke and express in many ways the present human condition, and - as such a process goes on - this book provides proposals for patterns to connect them to the modern and post-modern rules of self defining, reading the Other, interpreting world/national/cultural literatures, as well as to the various attempts to introduce the idea of gardens into the basic spatial and temporal aspects of contemporary communities. It also demonstrates the theoretical and practical attempts to project our “gardens` dependence” on to one of the essentials for contemporary societies which are multicultural, urbanised, technologically equipped and dependent, but which still are keen on reading and constructing paradises as environmental and cultural spaces for both asylum and encounter. The huge advantage of the book is showing to scholars and the wider public how discourses from the past meet with the quests of both the Humanities and the Sciences for gardening inspirations, not only for the sake of the today’s societies, but also when projecting the future of the Earth.