Antje Richter – Författare

Honorable Mention for the 2016 Kayden Book Award This first book-length study in Chinese or any Western language of personal letters and letter-writing in premodern China focuses on the earliest period (ca. 3rd-6th cent. CE) with a sizeable body of surviving correspondence. Along with the translation and analysis of many representative letters, Antje Richter explores the material culture of letter writing (writing supports and utensils, envelopes and seals, the transportation of finished letters) and letter-writing conventions (vocabulary, textual patterns, topicality, creativity). She considers the status of letters as a literary genre, ideal qualities of letters, and guides to letter-writing, providing a wealth of examples to illustrate each component of the standard personal letter. References to letter-writing in other cultures enliven the narrative throughout.Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China makes the social practice and the existing textual specimens of personal Chinese letter-writing fully visible for the first time, both for the various branches of Chinese studies and for epistolary research in other ancient and modern cultures, and encourages a more confident and consistent use of letters as historical and literary sources.

Health and the Art of Living offers reflections on health and illness in early medieval Chinese literature (ca. 200–ca. 600). Surveying a range of literary sources—essays, prefaces, correspondence, religious scriptures, and poetry—it explores the spectrum of views on health and illness expressed in these texts. Part One, centered on the essay “Nurturing the Vital Breath” in Liu Xie’s Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, reveals the deep concern of writers, troubled by overwork and excessive mental exertion, with the preservation and cultivation of their literary creativity. For them, the ability to write was inextricably connected with their social roles as officials. Part Two turns to self-narratives of health and illness in authorial prefaces, informal notes, formal letters, and official communications. Writers of these texts depicted their physical condition according to specific rhetorical purposes, whether that was to legitimize authorship, maintain intimate relationships, or avoid office. Part Three describes the rise of sickbed poetry, shaped by Xie Lingyun and the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra, which established illness as a topic in the refined literature of the period. Drawing attention to the grounding of literature in the lived experience of their creators, this book illuminates the conditions of literary production in early medieval China.