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Literary thought—both theory and criticism—is the prerequisite for situating literature and its function in a society, especially one that viewed letters as its preeminent civilizing enterprise. Over the course of early and medieval Chinese history, the character wen 文came to stand for the dynastic enterprise defined as a civilization of culture, scholarship and literature. The arc and substance of a literary tradition are not merely, or even mostly, penned by authors, but are no less equally inscribed by critical readers who articulate assumptions and expectations, promote certain values and standards of taste, and select the terms by which other readers interpret an author or work. Literary critics helped to found and maintain this civilization through their transhistorical preservation of a wen that shaped Chinese literature’s meaning and memory.
There is no more fruitful period than the early medieval era to focus an inquiry on the development and blossoming of Chinese literary thought. This period witnessed massive gains in cultural wealth as new literary genres and discursive forms were introduced, and the proliferation of examples ensued. The affordability and availability of paper enabled the expanding circulation of manuscripts and their duplication, hence increasing the likelihood of the transmission of texts to a more informed public. The widespread dissemination of texts in turn fostered nascent or new forms of literary and textual studies, such as bibliography, genre study, anthology making, and literary criticism, that undertook an accounting of this rapidly accumulating cultural capital. Early medieval literary critics and historians sought to manage the multiplication and spread of literary texts by composing cohesive or systematic accounts using the tools of definition, selection, and/or ranking. These critical readers seemed to have perceived and certainly attempted to address the need to arbitrate not only what was good literature but what literariness even was. The aspects that distinguished literature from other types of writing and branches of learning, such as the classics and histories, became the concern of critics who assumed the mandate to shape literary culture in the post-Shijing and Chuci tradition. My book project, whose working title is “Critical Readers: Literary Thought in Early Medieval China,” will examine major works of theory and criticism in order to illuminate the various assumptions about and demands for literary production in this foundational period.
There are hardly any studies in the English language devoted to the development of Chinese literary thought. James Liu’s Chinese Theories of Literature (1975) codifies the subject into five major types, such as metaphysical, technical and aesthetic theories, and illustrates each type with select examples drawn from various premodern periods. Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (1992) offers insightful comments and glosses interspersed in his translations (in whole or excerpt) of nearly a dozen important critical works from the beginning to the Qing dynasty. Wong Siu-kit’s Early Chinese Literary Criticism (1983) presents annotated translations of shorter works of literary thought from the Han through the Six Dynasties. These broad-ranging studies afford opportunities to develop their more specialized implications, which have yet to be examined in detail within the context of the development of this field of learning.
My project will proceed to this next step through a consideration of the refinement of judgment during the formative period of Chinese literary thought. It will illuminate habits of thought, patterns of reading, and shifting expectations about literary writing in theoretical and critical works from the early medieval period, such as Cao Pi’s 曹丕 “Discourse on Literature” 論文, Lu Ji’s 陸機 “Rhapsody on Literature” 文賦, Liu Xie’s 劉勰 The Literary Mind and Carving of Dragons 文心雕龍, Zhong Rong’s 鍾嶸 Grades of the Poets 詩品, as well as in discussions on literature in dynastic histories.
In my account of the hermeneutical operations and rhetorical strategies that these critical readers brought to bear upon authors and texts in the tradition, I will focus on how a critical reader asserted control over another’s work through evaluation and ranking, often in the name of transmitting a select part of a tradition for the benefit of future readers and writers; how a theorist justifies the place of literature in society and defines literature as a distinct field of learning; and what concerns, fears or obsessions of these critics that their approach and analysis might reveal. My study of literary thought in early medieval China aims to elucidate reading methods and expectations for literary production, as well as how critical readers sought to shape the literary tradition.
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