Chinese Buddhist Canons in The Age of Printing

An interdisciplinary deep dive into Buddhist jhāna meditation and how it can transform our understanding of self and consciousness

Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic provides the first detailed scholarly investigation of the cultural phenomenon of bookshelves (and the social practices around them) since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. With a foreword by Lydia Pyne, author of Bookshelf (2016), the volume brings together 17 scholars from 6 countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA) with expertise in literary studies, book history, publishing, visual arts, and pedagogy to critically examine the role of bookshelves during the current pandemic. This volume interrogates the complex relationship between the physical book and its digital manifestation via online platforms, a relationship brought to widespread public and scholarly attention by the global shift to working from home and the rise of online pedagogy. It also goes beyond the (digital) bookshelf to consider bookselling, book accessibility, and pandemic reading habits.

This book seeks to reconcile the dual forces of war and economic globalization in tracing China's early modernity. For late imperial China, there were two forms of encounter with the West; the guns of invading Europeans, and the ledgers by which trade between China and the West was measured and regulated. Even today, China's reactions to the West oscillate between business-driven openness and military paranoia. In this intellectual tour de force, Bozhong Li, one of China's preeminent intellectual and economic historians, traces the unprecedented transition that led China into the modern world; the book will be of value for economists, historians, and sinophiles alike.