《春秋左传》是我国现存最早的编年体史书，起自鲁隐公元年，迄于鲁哀公二十七年，是学习、研究先秦历史、文学、哲学和语言必读的典籍。作者积数十年之力，对左氏《春秋》经、传作详细校勘、分段、注释，充分吸收前人研究成果及近代考古资料，融会贯通，时出己见，是为当代《春秋左传》集大成之全注本。

《左传》是中国历史与文学的重要典籍。本书通过对《左传》文本进行解读，力图去把握其中所蕴含的阐释往事的原则和模式。当古人开始有意识要探寻历史，他们会进以思考重现阐释过程的方法，会更加重视阐释历史的基础。那么，阐释的结构是怎样建立起来的，又如何瓦解？对历史的理解有哪些可能， 又有哪些局限？本书回答这问题。
【名人推荐】
这一学术成果非常可观。它不仅提供了大量质量极高的英译（可与中文原文相对照），而且以精密细致的方式比较了不同的篇章，详细阐释了叙事所描述的事件。它意在分析修辞背后的目的，以及其它促使人们把《左传》视为“历史”的特质。
――戴伟生（Stephen Davidson）（美国西南大学）
通过此书的撰写，李惠仪为中国史学的诞生和发展提供了一项有趣而重要的分析。她成功地论证了中国古代史官在保存过往文献的同时，不仅努力理解过去所发生的事情，更力图条理自己的经历和记忆，并为之赋予意义。在很大程度上，古今中外撰写史书的人都会遇到这两个问题。因此，本书值得所有从事历史研究的专家阅读。
――王晴佳（罗文大学）

The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. How do interpretive structures develop and disintegrate? What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation (ca. 4th c. BCE). But in what sense is this vast collection of narratives and speeches covering the period from 722 to 468 BCE "historical"? If one can speak of an emergent sense of history in this text, Wai-yee Li argues, it lies precisely at the intersection of varying conceptions of interpretation and rhetoric brought to bear on the past, within a larger context of competing solutions to the instability and disintegration represented through the events of the 255 years covered by the Zuozhuan. Even as its accounts of proliferating disorder and disintegration challenge the boundaries of readability, the deliberations on the rules of reading in the Zuozhuan probe the dimensions of historical self-consciousness.