Tōdai no bungaku riron: “fukko” to “sōshin”

Serious research on Tang poetics has barely begun. The traditional scholarship of imperial China placed the rise of Tang poetry in a moralizing framework that obscured the distinction between spiritual orthodoxy and literary technique. In the 20th century, this mode was widely rejected, yet research was instead inhibited by recourse to conceptions of Chinese exceptionalism, reducing Tang poetics to one phase in a monolithic narrative of literary tradition continuous with the Book of Songs. Yet the finest scholarship of our time has already shown that the highest achievements of Tang poetry must be understood first of all in light of contingent and singular facets of that extraordinary epoch, such as its burgeoning cultural influences from Central Asia, the requirements and biases of the civil service examinations, the ongoing transformation of the Buddhist and Daoist religions, specific innovations in tonal prosody, the interregnum of Empress Wu, and the texture of Lady Yang’s stockings. The task that remains for us must be to continue exploring the specific ideological factors that inspired the flourishing of Tang poetics in its own time. In this unusually well-researched and well-documented new study, Nagata Tomoyuki of the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University has made a major contribution to the historical interpretation of Tang poetics. This is one of the most thorough treatments so far of the simple question: what did Tang people think of their own poetry? The difficulty of answering this previously has been that so little literary theory per se seems to have been written in the Tang, in striking contrast to the Six Dynasties. Professor Nagata’s solution has been to focus singlemindedly on the authentic discussions of literary values in the Tang that do remain extant. Thus the riron / lilun 理論 of the title does not really mean “theory” but should probably be understood literally as “ordered discourses” about literature. According to Nagata’s research, these texts consist essentially of two kinds: firstly, discourse evaluating the legacy of Chen Ziang陳子昂 (659–700) and upholding archaicist (fugu 復古) ideals; and secondly, the poetry manuals (shige 詩格), foremost