Authorial Strategies in Pursuit of the Great Book: Ruminations about a Published Dissertation on Han China [Review article]

An extensive review of Zhao Lu's IN PURSUIT OF THE GREAT PEACE: HAN DYNASTY CLASSICISM AND THE MAKING OF EARLY MEDIEVAL LITERATI CULTURE (2019) as an example of early-career PhD-thesis-turned-into-book, this essay raises a number of problems related to historiography, historical research methods, textual analysis, translation, and the distorting effects of analytical categories shaped by time and culture