Chinese sympathies: media, missionaries, and world literature from Marco Polo to Goethe
In: Signale: modern German letters, cultures, and thought
Introduction: sympathy and orientalism -- Marco Polo's fabulous imperial connections -- Jesuit channels between Europe and Asia -- The genealogy of compassionate reading -- News of the Ming dynasty's collapse -- Vondel's tragic Chinese emperor -- Wieland's secret history of cosmopolitanism -- Adam Smith and the Chinese earthquake -- Goethe reads the Jesuits -- Weimar pairings: idealism and Buddhism, Kant and the Jesuits -- World literature and Goethe's Chinese poetry.