Poetry in print culture: Texts, reading strategy, and compositional poetics in Huang Tingjian (1045--1105) and the late Northern Song (China)

This dissertation studies the Northern Song (960--1127) poet Huang Tingjian and the critical values closely associated with him and the Jiangxi School, especially their unique understanding and vision of methods of composition, with a special focus on the relationship between the rise of the Jiangxi poetics and the changing conditions of textual production brought about by printing. At the heart of my study is a sustained reading of Huang Tingjian's own writings as well as a wide range of texts produced by his contemporaries. Their fresh and sometimes intuitive responses to the new challenges in reading and writing created by the burgeoning print culture, I argue, provide a good opportunity to examine how changes in textual production entered into critical consciousness.; The first chapter examines a particular group of materials on poetry produced in the Tang (618--907) and the Five Dynasties (907--960) labeled collectively as shige, "patterns of poetry," which I argue provides the basic conceptual platform for the development of the Jiangxi poetics. The second chapter analyzes the strong desire in the intellectual culture of the late eleventh century to build absolute models, taking as my example the process of canonization of the Tang poet Du Fu (712--770), which, I argue, provides the immediate drive for the poetic transformation in Huang Tingjian and the Jiangxi School. The third chapter focuses on one central aspect in Huang Tingjian and the Jiangxi School's transformation of the poetic tradition; namely, their attempt to ground literary composition in the reading of books. The fourth chapter continues the exploration of the priority given to reading from a more historical and material perspective and by means of a case study. It investigates Huang Tingjian's revitalization and careful treatment of the term wanjuan, "ten thousand scrolls," a process indicative of the general pattern of interaction between the development of critical discourse on poetry and the material conditions of textual production. The dissertation concludes by putting Huang Tingjian and the Jiangxi School's unique perception of fa into larger contexts. The complexity of the Chinese term is also addressed by a brief comparison with its Western equivalent, "method."...