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- All Subjects: Song Dynasty
- All Subjects: Travel in literature
- Creators: Ling, Xiaoqiao
Description
The production of “separate collections” (bieji 別集) or collected works in China is a social practice that emerged between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE. This research focuses on how the practice developed over the course of the Song dynasty (960-1279) in terms of literary materials involved, competences required, associated meanings, and its links to other social practices. I examine extant collected works, descriptions of them, and contemporary feedback on their production to create a series of snapshots that reveal its trajectory over time. Surveying the emergence of the practice in the early imperial period through its development in medieval times shows that pre-Song dynasty production of collected works was the result of several pre-existing conditions: competences related to bookmaking, the emergence of the idea of the inscription of authorial personality in literary works, the elevated status of belles-lettres, and several pre-existing tropes that lent it increasing importance. As the practice began recruiting scholars in 1020, it underwent a series of changes: attention to loss and variation between editions gave way to the search for missing works and the production of increasingly complete and authentic editions. This was followed in 1080 by several innovations, including the organization of works literary according to chronological order, rhyme, or topical category and insertion of annotations and a chronological biography. After 1180, compilers began synthesizing the accomplishments of previous editions to make editions that featured multiple annotators arranged in increasingly sophisticated ways for a new readership that were strongly associated with commercial printing. I identify six varieties of the production of the collected works of Song authors, each with distinct aims and associations that differed with respect to elements of practice, the practitioners they recruited, and how they linked with other social practices toward larger social goals. Findings contribute to Chinese book history by contextualizing change in formalistic trends over time. Identified as a social practice, the account of change and variation in the compilation of collected works during the Song presented in this research adds unique perspective to the subject of social change in this pivotal period of Chinese history.
ContributorsBilling, John Samuel (Author) / Oh, Young (Thesis advisor) / Bokenkamp, Stephen (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / West, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation challenges the conventional understanding that Song dynasty China (960–1279) was a period when Confucianism was placed at the center of governance. Bringing heretofore inadequately studied Buddhist and Daoist texts into discussion, it offers three case studies on interrelationships between Song emperors and the Three Teachings of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. As shown in all three cases, although a religious campaign directed by the emperor and his institutional apparatus could set out under the influence of a certain teaching/religion, the campaign’s outcome at the state level would often be a fusion of various religious and cultural components. My research suggests that Song emperors employed an eclectic strategy in selecting and utilizing elements from the Three Teachings and attempted to build an imperial religion centered around themselves. As such, Song imperial power emerged as a centripetal force that compelled the Three Teachings to tailor themselves to the imperial religion. Therefore, I term the Song imperial court as a “regulated syncretic field” where segments from different religious traditions became amalgamated into religious/ritualistic entities that served imperial visions of the time. Although proponents of the Three Teachings by and large continued their efforts to gain imperial acceptance of their teachings, they often turned to local society to ensure their authority when their efforts at the court failed. Further, I argue that such phenomena were rooted in the mechanism of patriarchal governance in which the emperor considered themselves and was considered by leaders of the Three Teachings to be the patriarch of his household/empire, who was responsible for balancing the power structure among the Three Teachings.
ContributorsLi, Jiangnan (Author) / Tillman, Hoyt (Thesis advisor) / Bokenkamp, Stephen (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Hartman, Charles (Committee member) / Chen, Huaiyu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
My dissertation primarily investigates the vast literary corpus of “Qiantang meng”
錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved
specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which
appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song
scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su
Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during
the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an
early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao
herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an
extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary
genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous
notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how
travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help
develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is
representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that
collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and
express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”
complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can
reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and
reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression
of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally
dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are
intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the
literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties
formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and
individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the
complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape
during the late imperial period.
錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved
specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which
appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song
scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su
Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during
the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an
early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao
herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an
extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary
genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous
notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how
travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help
develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is
representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that
collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and
express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”
complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can
reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and
reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression
of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally
dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are
intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the
literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties
formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and
individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the
complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape
during the late imperial period.
ContributorsWu, Siyuan (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Cutter, Robert Joe (Committee member) / Oh, Young (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017