Imagined travel: Displacement, landscape, and literati identity in the song lyrics of Su Shi (1037--1101) (China)

This dissertation examines the pivotal role played by the prominent scholar-official and political exile, Su Shi (1037-1101), in transforming the song lyric ( ci) from a popular banquet song into a genre for reflecting on the displacement of official travel and exile. I argue that Su Shi created a vocabulary of landscape images and "traveling figures" that became a common medium for articulating literati identity by writers facing the problems of displacement through travel, political exile, or war. This dissertation explores this process in three parts. The first part traces the genealogy of Su Shi's song lyric style to two earlier song lyric writers of the 11th century. On the one hand, Su admired a segment of the song lyrics of Liu Yong (987-1053) who shaped the longer manci form into a popular "blues song" focused on the urban nostalgia of official travelers. On the other hand, Su Shi also drew on the song lyrics of his mentor, Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), who employed linked cycles of the shorter xiaoling form to write on the joys of inhabiting rural landscapes. But, during Su Shi's lifetime a relatively open and free-speaking political culture at court gave way to increased marginalization and exile of scholar-officials who opposed imperial policy. The second part shows how Su Shi developed two landscape modes in response to the displacement of political exile. The first mode focused on vast panoramic landscape scenes and the trope of dreaming or recalling the historical past as a form of imagined travel (shenyou) by which he could connect to a larger imaginary community of scholar-officials scattered throughout the country. The second landscape mode concerned intimate, level-view countryside scenes and the activity of leisurely strolling ( xianxing) as a trope for the poet's construction of his social identity in relation to the landscape of the local area. Finally, in the epilogue I examine how literati of the early Southern Song dynasty such as Ye Mengde (1077-1148) appropriated Su Shi's landscape modes in the song lyric in response to the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) and the loss of North China.