Winner of a 2006 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title Award
As medieval Chinese manuscripts were copied and recopied through the
centuries, both mistakes and deliberate editorial changes were
introduced, thereby affecting readers' impressions of the author's
intent. In Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture, Xiaofei Tian shows how
readers not only experience authors but produce them by shaping texts to
their interpretation. Tian examines the mechanics and history of textual
transmission in China by focusing on the evolution over the centuries of
the reclusive poet Tao Yuanming into a figure of epic stature.
Considered emblematic of the national character, Tao Yuanming (also
known as Tao Qian, 365?-427 c.e.) is admired for having turned his back
on active government service and city life to live a simple rural life
of voluntary poverty. The artlessness of his poetic style is held as the
highest literary and moral ideal, and literary critics have taken great
pains to demonstrate perfect consistency between Tao Yuanming's life and
poetry. Earlier work on Tao Yuanming has tended to accept this image,
interpreting the poems to confirm the image.
Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture is a study of how this cultural
icon was produced and of the elusive traces of another, historical Tao
Yuanming behind the icon. By comparing four early biographies of the
poet, Tian shows how these are in large measure constructed out of Tao
Yuanming's self-image as projected in his poetry and prose. Drawing on
work in European medieval literature, she demonstrates the fluidity of
the Chinese medieval textual world and how its materials were
historically reconfigured for later purposes.
Tian finds in Tao's poetic corpus not one essentialized Tao Yuanming,
but multiple texts continuously produced long after the author's
physical demise. Her provocative look at the influence of manuscript
culture on literary perceptions transcends its immediate subject and has
special resonance today, when the transition from print to electronic
media is shaking the literary world in a way not unlike the transition
from handwritten to print media in medieval China.
