The Mr. Simon Suen and Mrs. Mary Suen Sino-Humanitas Institute is committed to promoting intellectual exchange of Chinese Humanities in academia between East and West. The Institute is very glad to collaboate with the HKBU Institute of Creativity, with sponsorship from Hung Hin Shiu Charitable Foundation, to invite Professor Anna M. Shields from the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University to visit HKBU for two weeks during March and April and deliver a public lecture, to share her latest research findings and insight. All faculties, students and members of the public who are interested in the topic are welcome to register and participate.
Lecture by HKBU Institute of Creativity Distinguished Visitor: Transmission and Transformation: Shaping the Tang Literary Legacy in the Five Dynasties and Northern Song
Organizers: Institute of Creativity and Mr. Simon Suen and Mrs. Mary Suen Sino-Humanitas Institute, HKBU
Date: 28 March 2025, Friday
Time: 10:00-11:30am
Venue: Dr. Wu Yee Sun Lecture Theatre (WLB 109), Lam Woo International Conference Centre, Shaw Campus, Hong Kong Baptist University
Speaker: Professor Anna M. Shields (Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies, Princeton University; Institute of Creativity Distinguished Visitor, Hong Kong Baptist University)
Language: Mandarin
Registration link: https://forms.office.com/r/gZ3jcbLTza
Abstract:
The two centuries after the fall of the Tang dynasty were a pivotal moment in Chinese literary history: thanks to the diffusion of Tang works in the Five Dynasties period and the subsequent rise of print in the reunified Song dynasty, scholars were able to reassemble the Tang literary legacy and transmit it in new forms. Recent scholarship on reception history has helped us understand how this process affected the most important Tang writers, such as Li Bai, Du Fu, Han Yu, Bai Juyi, and Liu Zongyuan. But the story of the transmission of Tang literature extends far beyond individual writers or the creation of a Tang literary canon, and it is grounded in the far-reaching social, political, and cultural transformations of the tenth through twelfth centuries. Song scholars saw themselves as erudite interpreters of Tang literature—not merely “transmitters” of texts—and they reshaped the Tang tradition in ways that suited new Song interests in history and the moral and ethical dimensions of 文章. How might we use broad compilations of Tang literary knowledge to understand the forces that shaped the transmission and transformation of Tang literature in the Song? I focus on three examples from very different eras of Song history—the early Northern Song anthology 文苑英華, the revised literati biographies of the 新唐書, and in the innovative collection of Tang literary knowledge 唐詩紀事. Each of these works reveals scholars reshaping Tang literature in new forms to meet the unique needs of their historical moments. But they all demonstrate a shared Song belief in the power of individual readers to interpret and reimagine the Tang literary past. In conclusion, I will offer some remarks on contemporary reimaginations of the Tang in popular culture, and on the importance of teaching Tang literature to an increasingly diverse student population in the twenty-first century.
Speaker biography:
Anna M. Shields, Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies, received her A.M. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Indiana University. She specializes in classical Chinese literature of the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Northern Song eras. Her particular interests include literary history and the emergence of new literary genres and styles in late medieval China; the sociology of literature; and the role of emotions in classical literature. Her first book, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Collection from among the Flowers (Huajianji) (Harvard Asia Center, 2006) examined the emergence of the song lyric in this path-breaking anthology. Her second book, One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard Asia Center, 2015) explores the literary performance of friendship in ninth-century China through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts. One Who Knows Me was awarded the Honorable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Book Prize (pre-1900 China) from the Association for Asian Studies in 2017. Her most recent publication is the 2023 co-edited volume (with Gil Raz, Dartmouth College), Religion and Poetry in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (Amsterdam University Press). She is also co-editing with Robert Hymes (Columbia University) a two-volume set of essays from the Tang-Song Transitions Workshops and Conference held from 2017-2022 at Princeton and Columbia. In 2024, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her third monograph, currently titled Legacies of Gold and Jade: Transmissions of Tang Dynasty Literature in the Five Dynasties and Northern Song. As a member of the editorial board of the Library of Chinese Humanities, she is serving as the editor for Ronald Egan’s four-volume translation of the selected works of Su Shi. She chaired the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton from 2018-2019 and 2020-2024.
Enquiries: shi@hkbu.edu.hk / 3411 2562