Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community: Text, Ritual, and Community

Memory in Medieval China explores memory as performed in various genres of writing, from poetry to anecdotes, from history to tomb epitaphs, thereby illuminating ways in which the memory of persons, events, dynasties, and literary styles was constructed and revised. Intro -- Contents -- Contributors -- Introduction -- Robert Ford Campany and Wendy Swartz -- Chapter 1 -- Artful Remembrance: Reading, Writing, and Reconstructing the Fallen State in Lu Ji's "Bian wang" -- Meow Hui Goh -- Chapter 2 -- Intertextuality and Cultural Memory in Early Medieval China: Jiang Yan's Imitations of Nearly Lost and Lost Writers -- Wendy Swartz -- Chapter 3 -- On Mourning and Sincerity in the Li ji and the Shishuo xinyu -- Jack W. Chen -- Chapter 4 -- "Making Friends with the Men of the Past": Literati Identity and Literary Remembering in Early Medieval China -- Ping Wang -- Chapter 5 -- Yu Xin's "Memory Palace": Writing Trauma and Violence in Early Medieval Chinese Aulic Poetry -- Xiaofei Tian -- Chapter 6 -- Structured Gaps: The Qianzi wen and Its Paratexts as Mnemotechnics -- Christopher M.B.Nugent -- Chapter 7 -- Genre and the Construction of Memory: A Case Study of Quan Deyu's 權德 (759-818) Funerary Writings for Zhang Jian 張 (744-804) -- Alexei Kamran Ditter -- Chapter 8 -- Figments of Memory: "Xu Yunfeng" and the Invention of a Historical Moment -- Sarah M. Allen -- Chapter 9 -- The Mastering Voice: Text and Aurality in the Ninth-century Mediascape -- Robert Ashmore -- Index "Memory is not an inert container but a dynamic process. It can be structured by ritual, constrained by textual genre, and shaped by communities' expectations and reception. Urging a particular view of the past on readers is a complex rhetorical act. The collective reception of portrayals of the past often carries weighty implications for the present and future. The essays collected in this volume investigate various aspects of memory in medieval China (ca. 100-900 CE) as performed in various genres of writing, from poetry to anecdotes, from history to tomb epitaphs. They illuminate ways in which the memory of individual persons, events, dynasties, and literary styles was constructed and revised through processes of writing and reading. Contributors include: Sarah M. Allen, Robert Ashmore, Robert Ford Campany, Jack W. Chen, Alexei Ditter, Meow Hui Goh, Christopher M. B. Nugent, Xiaofei Tian, Wendy Swartz, Ping Wang"-- Provided by publisher