Anna Shields - Böcker

This volume of interdisciplinary essays examines the intersection of religion and literature in medieval China, focusing on the impact of Buddhism and Daoism on a wide range of elite and popular literary texts and religious practices in the 3rd-11th centuries CE. Drawing on the work of the interdisciplinary scholar Stephen Bokenkamp, the essays weave together the many cross-currents of religious, intellectual, and literary traditions in medieval China to provide vivid pictures of medieval Chinese religion and culture as it was lived and practiced. The contributors to the volume are all highly regarded experts in the fields of Chinese poetry, Daoism, Buddhism, popular religion, and literature. Their research papers cut across imagined disciplinary boundaries to show that the culture of medieval China can only be understood by close reading of texts from multiple genres, traditions, and approaches.

Previous translations and descriptions of Li Qingzhao are molded by an image of her as lonely wife and bereft widow formed by centuries of manipulation of her work and legacy by scholars and critics (all of them male) to fit their idea of a what a talented woman writer would sound like. The true voice of Li Qingzhao is very different. A new translation and presentation of her is needed to appreciate her genius and to account for the sense that Chinese readers have always had, despite what scholars and critics were saying, about the boldness and originality of her work. The introduction will lay out the problems of critical refashioning and conventionalization of her carried out in the centuries after her death, thus preparing the reader for a new reading. Her songs and poetry will then be presented in a way that breaks free of a narrow autobiographical reading of them, distinguishes between reliable and unreliable attributions, and also shows the great range of her talent by including important prose pieces and seldom read poems. In this way, the standard image of Li Qingzhao, exemplied by a handful of her best known and largely misunderstood works, will be challenged and replaced by a new understanding. The volume will present a literary portrait of Li Qingzhao radically unlike the one in conventional anthologies and literary histories, allowing English readers for the first time to appreciate her distinctiveness as a writer and to properly gauge her achievement as a female alternative, as poet and essayist, to the male literary culture of her day.

This selected translation of the writings of Su Shi (Su Dongpo, 1037–1101) includes all the genres of prose and poetry that he worked in. A special feature of this book is the arrangement of writings based strictly on the chronology of Su’s life, and consequently the mixing of different writing genres together, rather than keeping the genres apart (as normally done in selections of his works). This arrangement more accurately reflects the way his writing was produced in real time. It also highlights the range of his "voices" in different literary forms, and how he delighted in treating a single set of circumstances repeatedly in different genres to fulfill different expressive purposes.