Since its first publication, Paul A. Cohen's Discovering History in China has occupied a singular place in American China scholarship. Translated into three East Asian languages, the volume has become essential to the study of China from the early nineteenth century to today. Cohen critiques the work of leading postwar scholars and is especially adamant about not reading China through the lens of Western history. To this end, he uncovers the strong ethnocentric bias pervading the three major conceptual frameworks of American scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s: the impact-response, modernization, and imperialism approaches. In place of these, Cohen favors a "China-centered" approach in which historians understand Chinese history on its own terms, paying close attention to Chinese historical trajectories and Chinese perceptions of their problems, rather than a set of expectations derived from Western history. In an important new introduction, Cohen reflects on his fifty-year career as a historian of China and discusses major recent trends in the field. Although some of these developments challenge a narrowly conceived China-centered approach, insofar as they enable more balanced comparisons between China and the West and recast the Chinese and their history in more human, less exotic terms, they powerfully affirm the central thrust of Cohen's work.

Examines the craft of historiography against the backdrop of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1900. The text juxtaposes the account of historians with those of the participants and witnesses and sets these perspectives against the range of popular myths about the Boxers.

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, "Beautiful Losers" is Cohen's most defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint. By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, "Beautiful Losers" explores each character's attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint. "From the Paperback edition."

本书为早期后现代主义文学作品，通过“我”——一个英裔民俗学家，和“我”的导师、同性恋伙伴——法裔民族主义者F之间的断续交流、回忆以及仅存于他们意念中的“我”的妻子——印第安女子伊迪丝和历史上第一个印第安贞女圣徒凯瑟琳·特卡奎萨的言行、生平的片断描写，表现了二十世纪六十年代西方那段躁动的历史、放浪的生活。 本书前言 特色及评论 文章节选