Southern Song Poetry and the Project of Literary History

FAIN: FA-54651-09

Michael Anthony Fuller
Regents of the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA 92617-3066)

This project examines the transformation of poetry and poetics through the epochal changes in Chinese society and culture in the last two hundred years of the Song Dynasty (960-1280). Poets abandoned earlier commitments to poetry as tracing the encounter with the world and turned inward to see poetry as a revelation of the self. During this period, Neo-Confucian thinkers began to rethink the understanding of this self and its relationship with ethical universals and to the world of transient experience. Poets also engaged in the Neo-Confucian movement, and poetic and philosophical debates merged. To understand the interaction, I propose a model of the literary as aesthetic experience of language that draws on Kant's understanding of aesthetic judgments as intuitions of ordering without immediate conceptual content. Literary history, in this view, traces the difficulties of aesthetic experience that both founds and negates the conceptual content of texts.

Associated Products

Drifting among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History (Book)
Title: Drifting among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History
Author: Michael A. Fuller
Abstract: What drives literary change? Does literature merely follow shifts in a culture, or does it play a distinctive role in shaping emergent trends? Michael Fuller explores these questions while examining the changes in Chinese shi poetry from the late Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) to the end of the Southern Song (1127–1279), a period of profound social and cultural transformation. Shi poetry written in response to events was the dominant literary genre in Song dynasty China, serving as a central form through which literati explored meaning in their encounters with the world. By the late Northern Song, however, old models for meaning were proving inadequate, and Daoxue (Neo-Confucianism) provided an increasingly attractive new ground for understanding the self and the world. Drifting among Rivers and Lakes traces the intertwining of the practice of poetry, writings on poetics, and the debates about Daoxue that led to the cultural synthesis of the final years of the Southern Song and set the pattern for Chinese society for the next six centuries. Examining the writings of major poets and Confucian thinkers of the period, Fuller discovers the slow evolution of a complementarity between poetry and Daoxue in which neither discourse was self-sufficient.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674073227
Primary URL Description: HUP website
Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674073227
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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