Transgressive Typologies: Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China

Author:
Rebecca Doran

Publisher:
Harvard University Asia Center

Publication Date:
January 2017

Abstract:

The exceptionally powerful Chinese women leaders of the late seventh and early eighth centuries—including Wu Zhao 武曌, the Taiping 太平 and Anle 安樂 princesses, Empress Wei 韋, and Shangguan Wan’er 上官婉兒—though quite prominent in the Chinese cultural tradition, remain elusive and often misunderstood or essentialized throughout history. Transgressive Typologies utilizes a new, multidisciplinary approach to understand how these figures’ historical identities are constructed in the mainstream secular literary-historical tradition and to analyze the points of view that inform these constructions.

Using close readings and rereadings of primary texts written in medieval China through later imperial times, this study elucidates narrative typologies and motifs associated with these women to explore how their power is rhetorically framed, gendered, and ultimately deemed transgressive. Rebecca Doran offers a new understanding of major female figures of the Tang era within their literary-historical contexts, and delves into critical questions about the relationship between Chinese historiography, reception-history, and the process of image-making and cultural construction.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. Female Rule and Its Representation: Gender, Paradigm, and Historical Narrative

2. (Self)Expression and Gendered Legitimacy: Projection of Identity in Literature of the Late Seventh Century through the Jinglong Era

3. Ritual, Signs, and the Interpretation of Female Power

4. Building Power: Symbolic Architecture, Conspicuous Consumption, and Rule by Women

5. Gender Anarchy and the Rhetorical Overthrow of Female Rule

Conclusion

[Dissertation] The Core Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu

Author:
Yegor Grebnev

Year:
2016 

School:
University of Oxford

Abstract:

In this thesis, I discuss a group of compositionally related “core” chapters within the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書, a collection of 59 texts from ancient China that has received very limited attention in scholarship. The texts in this collection are difficult to read and interpret because of their poor preservation and the lack of concise commentaries. 

I develop a methodological strategy for the identification of philologically related texts within the collection, which allows me to single out a group of texts related by compositional structures, rhetorical patterns and characteristic formulaic expressions. I call such chapters “kingly consultations”, considering that most of such texts are presented as speeches involving sage rulers of the Western Zhou 西周 (mid. 11th century – 771 BC), in which they share the fundamental wisdoms of kingship. I argue that these texts are remnants of an important ritualised textual practice, which has left traces not only in the Yi Zhou shu, but also in other collections, such as the Liu tao 六韜 (Six Bow Cases), which is commonly classified among “military” texts. 

I reconstruct elements of the socio-political context of the kingly consultations using comparative insight. I examine the numerical lists used for systematisation of knowledge against similar lists in the Pāli canon. I also explain the significance of the expressions that emphasise the secretive transmission of texts against better known esoteric textual communities in China and Japan. Such comparison allows me to preliminarily identify the communities behind the kingly consultations as based on strict knowledge-based hierarchy, but prone to segmentation. Finally, I position the kingly consultations within the broader context of the practice of treasure texts. This practice is an important development in ancient China that led to the emergence of a new type of textual authority by “detaching” earlier epigraphic texts from their precious material carriers and introducing them into novel environment of manuscript culture.

Tense and Aspect in Han Period Chinese : A Linguistic Analysis of the 'Shĭjì'

Author:
Barbara Meisterernst

Publisher:
Berlin ; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton

Publication Date:
December 2014

Abstract:

Many grammatical issues of Archaic and Medieval Chinese still lack a comprehensive analysis. The book provides the first thorough investigation of the syntactic and semantic constraints of the linguistic categories tense and aspect and their relation with the lexical aspect of the verb in Han period Chinese. The author uncovers fascinating details of a language with a highly restricted verbal morphology.

Table of Contents:


1. General introduction

2. The category tense

3. The category aspect

4. Tense and aspect in Chinese

5. The syntactic and semantic analysis of temporal adverbials and duration phrases

6. The syntactic and semantic constraints of aspecto-temporal adverbs in the Shiji

Conclusion

後漢魏晋史論攷: 好並隆司遺稿集

Author:
好並隆司 Yoshinami Takashi

Publisher:
広島:溪水社

Publication Year:
2014

Abstract:

前著『前漢政治史研究』につづく後漢魏晋期の政治史に関する論文と、中国の被差別民や水利史に関する社会史研究を収録。

Table of Contents:

前　　文………佐川英治

第一部　後漢・魏晋史研究

　伝国璽再考
　「皇帝と天子」称号の考察
　後漢期、皇帝・皇太后の政治と儒家思想
　皇太后称制の統治機構
　後漢期、皇太后・宦官の支配様式
　曹魏王国の成立
　魏・晋代、司馬・曹両氏の浮華・老荘思想をめぐる政争
　後漢・魏代における天・人思想の展開
　「浮華」論考
　魏朝における曹爽専権の時代

第二部　社会史研究

　楽戸以前
　楽戸をめぐって
　漢籍史料よりみた中国の被差別民
　山西省の碑刻に見える水利祭祀と灌漑

あとがき………好並　晶
事項索引
人名索引

[Dissertation] Verse and Lore: 'Poems on History' (yongshi shi 詠史詩) from the Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選)

Author:

Yue, Zhang

School:

University of Toronto

Year:

2014

Abstract:

This dissertation discusses how cultural memory and nostalgia are demonstrated and negotiated in poems through investigating the section of ―Poems on History in the Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選). 

Chapter One lays a solid foundation for further discussion, mainly exploring previous Chinese and English scholarship on poems on history in the early medieval period (220-580) and providing a brief history of this subgenre up to this point. 

Chapter Two examines why the Wen xuan editors chose certain poems in the section of Poems on History through a case study of the reception of Zuo Si‘s poems. The reception and canonization process of his poems serve as a good example to illustrate how the memory of literary past is shaped and mediated by the intellectual and cultural zeitgeist of this period. 

Chapter Three deals with the different approaches by which the poets connect historical lore with poetry, and shows the sophistication of poems on history in Chinese literary tradition. 

The last two chapters discuss two case studies: one is from Zuo Si 左思, an earlier case and the other on Yan Yanzhi 顏延之, a case closer to the Wen xuan editors' time period. Chapter Four explicitly discusses how poets use literature as a way to create a poetic-self as an alternative to images transmitted in standard histories, a represented self under their control through which poets influence their contemporaries and later readers‘ perception and memories about them. A good case study of this process is Zuo Si's ―Poems on History. 

Chapter Five talks about the formation of poets' reputation in history, not based on their political achievements and contributions, but on the highly admirable moral values and ideals expressed in their poetry, which become models for later literati. Yan Yanzhi's ―Poems on the Five Lords‖ is a case study that shows the continuing tradition of character appraisal, dealing with five historical figures who were remembered because of their musical, literary, and spiritual cultivation. Thus poems on history--their composition, their reception, their transmission through anthologies--are shown to have been a vital means of interpreting and evaluating the past, and to have played an important role in shaping Chinese identity and character through literature.

The Ancient State of Puyŏ in Northeast Asia: Archaeology and Historical Memory

Author:
Mark E. Byington

Publication Date:
October 2016

Publisher:
Harvard University Asia Center

Abstract:

Mark E. Byington explores the formation, history, and legacy of the ancient state of Puyŏ 扶餘, which existed in central Manchuria from the third century BCE until the late fifth century CE. As the earliest archaeologically attested state to arise in northeastern Asia, Puyŏ occupies an important place in the history of that region. Nevertheless, until now its history and culture have been rarely touched upon in scholarly works in any language. The present volume, utilizing recently discovered archaeological materials from Northeast China as well as a wide variety of historical records, explores the social and political processes associated with the formation and development of the Puyŏ state, and discusses how the historical legacy of Puyŏ—its historical memory—contributed to modes of statecraft of later northeast Asian states and provided a basis for a developing historiographical tradition on the Korean peninsula. Byington focuses on two major aspects of state formation: as a social process leading to the formation of a state-level polity called Puyŏ, and as a political process associated with a variety of devices intended to assure the stability and perpetuation of the inegalitarian social structures of several early states in the Korea–Manchuria region.

Table of Contents:

Puyo in studies of early northeast Asia

The archaeology of Puyo : part one: Bronze Age antecedents

The archaeology of Puyo : part two: formation of the Puyo state

History of the Puyo state

Society and territory of the Puyo state

Post-conquest Puyo survivals

Two phases of state formation

Appendix: Puyo in studies of historical geography