The birth of the author: Oral traditions and the construction of authorial identity in ancient Greece and China

This dissertation examines traditions surrounding the concept of authorship in Archaic and Classical Greece and in pre-Imperial China, i.e. before the fourth century BCE. I operate from the premise that the earliest literary traditions in both cultures have their origins in oral-traditional poetry, although in both cases these oral traditions migrate to written text for their transmission, preservation and reproduction. In both traditions, the oral origins of early poetry are largely accepted. The process of textualization, by which oral traditions became written texts, is however the subject of much controversy. Ideas of authorship give meaning to claims of authenticity for particular texts, and are thus intimately connected to concepts of textuality. A study of the development of ideas of authorship in early Greece and China has much to tell us, then, about the history of textualization.; It is not my intention to create a strict typology of authorship by which Greece and China may be distinguished. That notwithstanding, an examination of the evidence reveals striking differences in the methods used in each culture to provide meaningful contexts for works of literature. If, as Albert Lord says, oral-traditional poetry is composed in performance, then Greek ideas of authorship tend to fix the act of composition, while Chinese ideas focus on a defining performance context. As my examination of the stories associated with authors within the citharodic strand of the lyric poetic tradition reveals, Greek culture tended to imagine the author in terms defined by hero-cult. The author himself (or herself) could easily gain recognition as a hero, but there are other levels of connection as well. The biography created for a poet might (as is the case with Terpander) bear the same relationship to musical competitions at festival that myths about heroes bore to festival ritual, and in other cases, as with Stesichorus, the poet's life might be defined by, and derive its meaning from, the interaction with a hero.; In the Chinese Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry) tradition, a very different notion of authorship prevails in the earliest stages. The Confucian ideology with which the poems were linked permitted the concept of anonymous popular authorship, but required that poems gained their meaning through association with political events. In two studies, one of the use of poems from the Shi Jing (and especially the Guofeng [Airs of the States] section of the collection) in the early historical text the Zuozhuan, and one of the traditions surrounding the performance of the Dawu dance associated with the Temple Hymns of Zhou, the Zhou Song, I demonstrate the ways in which poem and historical event are mutually constitutive, and explore the anxiety surrounding the proper performance context for the poems of the Shi Jing.