This study aims to engage the textual realities of medieval literature by shedding light on the material lives of poems during the Tang, from their initial oral or written instantiation through their often lengthy and twisted paths of circulation. Tang poems exist today in stable written forms assumed to reflect their creators’ original intent. Yet Tang poetic culture was based on hand-copied manuscripts and oral performance. We have almost no access to this poetry as it was experienced by contemporaries. This is no trivial matter, the author argues. If we do not understand how Tang people composed, experienced, and transmitted this poetry, we miss something fundamental about the roles of memory and copying in the circulation of poetry as well as readers’ dynamic participation in the creation of texts. We learn something different about poems when we examine them, not as literary works transcending any particular physical form, but as objects with distinct physical attributes, visual and sonic. The attitudes of the Tang audience toward the stability of texts matter as well. Understanding Tang poetry requires acknowledging that Tang literary culture accepted the conscious revision of these works by authors, readers, and transmitters. 2012 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Pre-1900 Category, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies
This study aims to engage the textual realities of medieval literature by shedding light on the material lives of poems during the Tang, from their initial oral or written instantiation through their often lengthy and twisted paths of circulation. Tang poems exist today in stable written forms assumed to reflect their creators’ original intent. Yet Tang poetic culture was based on hand-copied manuscripts and oral performance. We have almost no access to this poetry as it was experienced by contemporaries. This is no trivial matter, the author argues. If we do not understand how Tang people composed, experienced, and transmitted this poetry, we miss something fundamental about the roles of memory and copying in the circulation of poetry as well as readers’ dynamic participation in the creation of texts. We learn something different about poems when we examine them, not as literary works transcending any particular physical form, but as objects with distinct physical attributes, visual and sonic. The attitudes of the Tang audience toward the stability of texts matter as well. Understanding Tang poetry requires acknowledging that Tang literary culture accepted the conscious revision of these works by authors, readers, and transmitters. 2012 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Pre-1900 Category, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies
Through close examination of a set of educational works discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts, this book presents new insights into the literary training undertaken by the elite of medieval China. In their contents and structures, these works tell us what parts of the literary and cultural inheritance the elite were expected to learn and how they learned them. The material aspects of these manuscripts—including handwriting, copying errors, and paratextual additions—show how students in Dunhuang used and reproduced them. What emerges is a picture of a literary education that is more diverse in its sources, and also more haphazard, than previously imagined.
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