Description
Book SynopsisIn The City of Ye in the Chinese Literary Landscape, Joanne Tsao demonstrates how the city of Ye changed from an iconic space that represented Cao Cao’s heroic enterprise to a symbol of the fruitlessness of human endeavour, and then finally to a literary landmark, a synecdoche for the vicissitudes of human life caught in the predictable cycles of dynastic rise and decline. Through a close reading of literary works on Ye, she illustrates how the city transformed from a lived to imaginative space to become a symbol in the poetic lexicon. Making use of literary and historical texts on Ye and its material remains through the Song and beyond she shows the potency of place as a generative force in literary production and in historical discourse.
Trade Review"This is a well-researched, comprehensive study with attentive care to the translation and interpretation of primary literary texts, a valuable addition to the field of early medieval Chinese literature and cultural history. [...] The well-founded scholarship we find in this book is based on a broad knowledge of the secondary literature and solid philological expertise in both textual and literary criticism. It should be of interest to readers who study early medieval Chinese literature and culture, cities and their cultural history, and reception history. This book lays a good foundation on which future works can build, since, as Tsao notes, many poems on Ye have survived that are beyond the scope of this book. Period-specific works will be able to devote more space to contextualizing and examining how Ye, Cao Cao, 'Jian’an literature,' or the 'terrace' as a site may be related to other cultural issues of that period." – Lu Kou, Bard college, in JAOS 141/3 (2021).
