STORIES AND STORYTELLERS IN A CHANGING WORLD: MANLING LUO'S LITERATI STORYTELLING IN LATE MEDIEVAL CHINA

Abstract

The heterogeneity of the anecdotes and stories that remain to us from late medieval China is both a blessing and a curse for the modern reader. The diversity of information and viewpoints encompassed within this body of material makes it a rich resource for understanding how people of the time (especially elite men) envisioned recent events, other members of their community, and social, literary, religious, and broader cultural practices. But this very diversity also makes the corpus unwieldy, comprised as it is of thousands of individual accounts written for different purposes and from different perspectives. Although some items are artfully wrought, these narratives were not recorded primarily as belletristic literature; nor can we assume them to be reliable accounts of historical events, though they contain valuable historical information. Rather, through these accounts a multiplicity of voices speaks to us from over a millennium ago, some more purposefully than others, by turns amusing, shocking, or moving us—and at times almost certainly perplexing us as we strive to makes sense of the cast of characters arrayed before us, the relationships among them, and the significance of their actions. To distill from this cacophony what individual voices are trying to say to us, or what in aggregate it tells us about their era, is no easy task. Manling Luo’s recent book Literati Storytelling in Late Medieval China is important because it seeks to do precisely this. Luo uses an array of narrative works by elite male writers (and one non-elite work) dating from the mid-eighth to the midtenth centuries to examine how scholar-officials of the era envisioned their place in a world in which routes to professional success and the composition of the elite were changing in the decades after the An Lushan rebellion. She situates her exploration of individual works within a broader framework in which the stories themselves were both a response to and an agent of ongoing social transformations. This framework has three parts. First, Luo identifies these changes in elite male life as the very raison-d’être for the stories, writing, “The central argument of this book is that stories flourished after the rebellion because of the radical changes experienced by contemporary scholar-officials going through the watershed reconfiguration of the Chinese elite” (5). Second, Luo argues that such accounts not only reflect literati Tang Studies, 33. 111–128, 2015