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Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture. Edited, with an introduction, by Paul W. Kroll . Sinica Leidensia, vol. 117. Leiden: Brill , 2014. Pp. vi + 310. €126, $164.
This volume consists of nine essays by authors who gathered at the University of Colorado in Boulder on February 20-22, 2013, for a conference titled "New Perspectives on Medieval Chinese Poetry." In the introduction, Paul W. Kroll, the editor and a contributor, defines the time frame of the Chinese medieval era and provides a summary of scholarship on medieval Chinese poetry in English since the 1960s. The essays presented here thus have the sense of continuing previous work and exploring new directions.
The first piece is Wendy Swartz's "Trading Literary Competence: Exchange Poetry in the Eastern Jin." Xuanyan .. poetry is traditionally considered tasteless for its lack of personal feelings. In poetic exchanges between Eastern Jin writers, though few pieces have been transmitted intact, Swartz finds affective conversations on xuanxue topics that are related to individual aspirations and mutual friendship. Read in such a context, these poems also present an image of Xie An ... (320-385) that later readers are less accustomed to seeing. Swartz's close reading shows a literary skill in interpreting texts that were neither easy to master then, nor are they easy to decipher now.
While Swartz interprets the elite language of Eastern Jin, Robert Joe Cutter, in his essay "Shen Who Couldn't Write: Literary Relationships at the Court of Liu Jun," covers a wide spectrum of literary competence and preference at the courts of Liu Song rulers, particularly that of Liu Jun ... (430-464, r. 453-64). Besides the group compositions of shi ... and fu ... at the ruler's command that are usually discussed in studies of...