Introduction

The project has been formulated on the basis of seminars and exchanges of opinions with specialists in the fields of linguistics, psychology, history and literature. It started in the "Orientale" University of Naples, and has been developed with the co-operation of other European and Chinese institutions.

In our research project we intend to study emotions and states of mind in various literary and historical contexts, based on the collection, evaluation, presentation and critical analysis of various sources. These are mainly written material (stories, novels, drama, annotations, diaries, poems, moral and philosophical essays). Iconographic material (printings, engravings, paintings, temples' images) is occasionally used as supplementary sources. In our analysis of the texts we use methods from psychology and literary criticism as ancillary disciplines. This approach, therefore, represents a new attempt at understanding the "world of mind" of a certain civilisation and period by means of a multi-focal and interdisciplinary way of reading and analysing sources.

The Project intends to promote a mutual cooperation with Asiatic and European academic institutions aiming to inquire into mental and intellectual world of European and Asian civilisations through textual analysis. In the Italian-Chinese Project which has already been established between Italian and Chinese institutions (Department of Chinese of Renmin University, the Beijing Normal University, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) the Italian side examines some basic Chinese literary and historical sources of Ming and Qing dynasties with the help of Chinese scholars. Cooperation with other important institutions in Indonesia has been recently established.

Through our research of verbal and non-verbal expressions of emotions we intend to collect and combine fragments of so called "mental structure" in Ming and Qing China, in order to create a thesaurus that allows to understand how emotions were represented and perceived, as well as how social and ideological influenced emotional behaviour. The field of observation covers feelings and reactions, attitudes, desires and abhorrence, moral, religious and aesthetic feelings, pleasure and grief, the world of the imagery, etc.: these are all elements which constitute the mental sphere of a certain culture in a certain period. This project thus aims at studying the ways in which these fundamental emotions are presented, perceived, and evaluated in Ming and Qing sources.

The project is based on the hypothesis that emotions are social phenomena. They are influenced by the peculiar culture of a certain society, reflect collective imagery, and at the same time they are expressed in human behaviour and justify it. Their interaction with society is double, because they mirror the culture by which they are shaped, but also influence the evolution of that society at any level.

In the second hypothesis, emotions are a way of interaction with external world: as a consequence, emotions create a system of cognition and communication. The role of the written text as one of the means of transmission of the codes of emotions, is examined: especially literary works allow the sharing of the affective experiences presented by writers. Fiction is thus the privileged source for its rich material as well as its narrative structure. 

The primary result of the project is, therefore, a glossary that may be a useful instrument for any historical and literary analysis. Besides that, the information collected may also be useful for lexicographic purposes, such as the diachronic analysis of meaning, the definition of semantic changes, the analysis of the expansion and reduction of semantic fields of each term, studies on the evolution of the lexicon, and on the frequency of certain words, etc. In fact, the study of expressive or emotive meaning in language cannot be separated from a concurrent investigation into distinctive emotion-management styles. This analysis would also enable us to establish links between emotions within the symbolic and social systems, as well as interactions between emotional meanings and value systems (see method of work).

The publication of an Encyclopaedia of Emotions and States of Mind in Ming and Qing Literary and Non-literary Sources (in several volumes) will be the immediate concrete result of our research, as it will represent an important instrument to throw new light on the private life and on mental categories of traditional China.

The realization of this Project has been possible thanks to the generous support of Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

For any further information address to:

Prof. Paolo Santangelo
Storia dell'Asia Orientale

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Facoltà di Studi Orientali
Via Principe Amedeo, 182b - Roma

E-mail: paolo.santangelo@uniroma1.it