A Wild Deer Amid Soaring Phoenixes: The Opposition Poetics of Wang Ji PDF
Preview A Wild Deer Amid Soaring Phoenixes: The Opposition Poetics of Wang Ji
A WILD DEER AMID SOARING PHOENIXES A WILD DEER AMID SOARING PHOENIXES The Opposition Poetics of Wang Ji ❁ Ding Xiang Warner UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS HONOLULU Publication has been supported in part by a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. ©2003 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warner, Ding Xiang. A wild deer amid soaring phoenixes:the opposition poetics of Wang Ji / Ding Xiang Warner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2669-8 (alk. paper) 1. Wang, Ji, 585–644—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title: Opposition poetics of Wang Ji. II. Title. PL2677.W265 Z95 2003 895.1’124—dc21 2003005066 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed bySantos Barbasa Jr. Printed byThe Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Contents ❁ Acknowledgments • vii A Note on Transliteration • ix Introduction: Reading Wang Ji • 1 1. Wang Ji and Sui-Tang Literati Culture • 13 2. The Recluse as Philosopher • 43 3. The Recluse as Farmer-Scholar • 67 4. The Recluse as Drunkard • 89 5. “You Beishan fu”and the Problem of Knowing • 113 Conclusion: The Idealization of the Recluse • 147 Notes • 153 Bibliography • 201 Index • 211 Index of Titles in English • 215 Index of Titles in Chinese • 217 • v • Acknowledgments ❁ uring the long D course of preparing this book, I have received gener- ous support and encouragement from good friends, nurturing teachers, and kindhearted colleagues. To all of them I wish to express my deep grat- itude. I especially thank the following for their major roles in helping me to shape and complete this study of Wang Ji’s poetry: Professors David R. Knechtges, William G. Boltz, and Jerry Norman of the University of Washington for the invaluable training they provided me during my gradu- ate school years as well as their comments on the initial stage of this proj- ect represented by my Ph.D. dissertation; the late Professor Jack L. Dull, also of the University of Washington, for his remarks during one of our conversations which assisted me in conceiving of my approach to inter- preting Wang Ji’s poetry; Professor Alvin P. Cohen of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for his input on an earlier version of the manu- script and for his encouragement since; and Professor Daniel Boucher of Cornell University for his timely assistance with several of Wang Ji’s obscure allusions to Buddhist texts. I am also greatly indebted to Professor Paul W. Kroll of the University of Colorado, Boulder, both for his unflag- ging support of my work on Wang Ji over the years and for his meticulous reading of the manuscript in its penultimate form. His scrupulous detail and accuracy saved me from potential embarrassments and his insightful suggestions for revision (or requests for clarification) helped to improve my argument in many places. I am likewise grateful to an anonymous reader for the University of Hawai‘i Press for many useful comments and recommendations; to Mr. Don Yoder for his careful copyediting of the final manuscript; and to Ms. Pamela Kelley, whose efforts made the entire process of this book’s evaluation and preparation for the University of • vii • viii • acknowledgments Hawai‘i Press a genuine pleasure. For any errors of fact or interpretation that remain in its pages, however, I am of course solely responsible. Members of the American Oriental Society, Western Branch, gave me several opportunities to present portions of my work on the life and poetry of Wang Ji at their annual meetings, and their feedback helped me to develop a number of ideas presented in this study. Some material included in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book was previously published in an earlier form. I thank Paul W. Kroll and the American Oriental Society for per- mission to reprint a revised version of my essay “Mr. Five Dippers of Drunkenville: The Representation of Enlightenment in Wang Ji’s Drinking Poems,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 118(3) (1998): 347–355. I thank Ge Yun and China’s Jiangsu Education Press for permission to use “Shi lun Wang Ji de ‘You Beishan fu’” (Inquiry into the Reading of Wang Ji’s “Fu on Roaming the Northern Mountains”), in Cifu wenxue lunji (Essays on cifu literature), ed. Chinese Department of Nanjing University (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999), pp. 426–439. I am, as well, profoundly grateful to the Hull Memorial Publication Fund review committee at Cornell University. A generous grant from this fund met the extra production costs of including Chinese characters in the text and notes of this book. Finally, I wish to express my most sincere thanks to my husband, J. Christopher Warner, an accomplished scholar in the field of English Renaissance literature. Throughout my work on this project he was my most avid supporter, always taking time from his teaching and research schedule to listen to my ideas, ask probing questions, and critique my drafts. I learned as much from his critical insights as the manuscript bene- fits from them. Chris, this book is for you. A Note on Transliteration ❁ ll transliterations A of Chinese in this study are in pinyin. When quoting English translations and studies that employ the Wade-Giles sys- tem, I have silently changed their spellings to pinyin for the sake of unifor- mity. I have not, however, altered in any way the titles of these works. • ix •
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