| This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of Cui Shu (1740-1816), a Confucian Classical scholar largely unrecognized by his Qing contemporaries, whose contributions to the study of high antiquity have been widely recognized in this century. After a detailed examination of Cui Shu's background and biographical materials, this study explores the scholarly relationships of Cui Shu especially in the context of mid-Qing intellectual transformations. It then analyzes his historical skepticism and inquiry within the scope of Qing Learning, emphasizing their links with previous modes in Chinese historical thought. Cui Shu's work, this study concludes, offers far more than a body of empirical research--it provides a critical methodology for textual criticism and historical inquiry in Qing Learning; although in his case that methodology remains constrained by applying to all texts except the Five Classics. His work has philosophical and epistemological implications for the twentieth-century scholars that Cui Shu may not have grasped himself as discussed in this study. Finally, the thesis assesses the Cui Shu rediscovery.; After the long neglect, Cui Shu's posthumous publications and surviving manuscripts were taken up during the May Fourth Cultural Movement by Chinese historians looking for indigenous anticipations of the "new history." Cui Shu's work became the main, though not the only, source for twentieth-century reevaluations of ancient history. With the rise of the Critiques of Ancient History (Gushibian) in the 1920s, Hu Shi, Gu Jiegang and other intellectuals celebrated Cui Shu's thought as novel and groundbreaking.; Cui Shu did anticipate issues important to modern Chinese historians; his doubting of antiquity and textual authentication in particular were appealing and powerful anticipations of modern standards of historical scholarship. However, his doubting has too frequently been appropriated uncritically and ahistorically by modern critics, who, because of their specific ideological agendas, neglect the crucial Confucian dimensions and delimitations of Cui Shu's thought. Thus this study also reconsiders and supplements Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang's pioneering work on Cui Shu by restoring a larger historical framework. Thus seen, Cui Shu's voice, in speaking to scholars of later generations, is both unconventional and of its time. |
