Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture
Douban
Xiaoshan Yang
overview
A poetic culture consists of a body of shared values and conventions that shape the composition and interpretation of poetry in a given historical period. This book on Wang Anshi (1021–1086) and Song poetic culture—the first of its kind in any Western language—brings into focus a cluster of issues that are central to the understanding of both the poet and his cultural milieu. These issues include the motivations and consequences of poetic contrarianism and the pursuit of novelty, the relationship between anthology compilation and canon formation, the entanglement of poetry with partisan politics, Buddhist orientations in poetic language, and the development of the notion of late style.
Though diverse in nature and scope, the issues all bear the stamp of the period as well as Wang Anshi’s distinct personality. Conceived of largely as a series of case studies, the book’s individual chapters may be read independently of each other, but together they form a varied, if only partial, mosaic of Wang Anshi’s work and its critical reception in the larger context of Song poetic culture.
contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note to the Reader
Introduction
1. “Song of Brilliant Lady”: The Lure and Peril of Contrarianism
Genesis
The Moral Problematics
The Impossible Defense
The Matching Poems
Contrarian Personality and Contrarian Poetics
2. Tradition and Individuality in Tang baijia shixuan
The Making of the Anthology
The Intentionality Theory
The Circumstance Theory
The Availability of Tang Masters
The Quality of the Selections
The Prefatory Claim
The Anthological Tradition
3. Late Style
The Canonization of Du Fu
Chronology, Periodization, and Stylistic Evolution
The Discursive Rise of Late Style
The Counterdiscourse
The Repudiation of Juvenility and the Elevation of Lateness
Toward the Wang Anshi Style
A Cross-Cultural Reflection
4. From Cold Mountain to Bell Mountain: An Excursion into Poetic Buddhism
A Typology of Hanshan’s Poetry
From Allusion to Imitation
A New Direction
Mindscaping Bell Mountain
5. “Hard to Trust You”: Generic Convention and Partisan Politics
Authorship and Meaning
The Minister and His Emperor
The Abandoned Woman in Chinese Poetry
From the Poetry of Politics to the Politics of Poetry
6. Epilogue: Positioning Wang Anshi in Song Poetic History
7. Conclusion
Works Cited
Index