Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation by Alexander Beecroft (review)

This book is a rare foray into comparative literature in its boldest form, an examination of two mutually isolated literatures. Though for most scholars the challenges of approaching simultaneously two cultures so far removed as ancient Greece and China seem insurmountable, the potential rewards are also great. In the field of Homeric epic, in fact, a comparative approach famously bore fruit in the oralformulaic theory of Parry and Lord, who used the compositional methods of living Yugoslavian bards as evidence in the analysis of the Homeric epic. Not coincidentally, Beecroft draws considerably on the insights of this theory (particularly as presented in more recent scholarship by Gregory Nagy and others), and so by authorship refers not so much to the original composition of a work, of which we often have meager factual evidence, as its later performance, transmission, and circulation.

In the practice this means that in the Greek half of the book Beecroft is interested primarily in biographical narratives about authors, while in the Chinese half he is interested primarily in the quotation and interpretation of Shijing poems. In the Greek case, Beecroft criticizes the habit of modern scholars to denigrate these narratives for their biographical fallacy (presuming that all the contents of a literary work must directly inscribe facts of the author’s life) and terms this habit the “reverse biographical fallacy” (p. 2). In place of the reverse biographical fallacy, he argues, we ought to read these narratives as a kind of “implied poetics” (p. 2) or “implicit poetics” (p. 26), that indirectly offer us various proposals about the significance of a poem, rather than merely criticizing the sources for historical inaccuracy.

Beecroft’s presentation of both concepts is a clear and helpful contribution to literary scholarship. It is surely correct to find in these biographical narratives critical perspectives on the uses of literature, which are as important as the more famous statements of explicit poetic theory that tend to dominate scholarly discourse. Moreover, this is exactly the kind of issue for which the comparative approach ought to be useful. Just as Parry, Lord, and later adherents made use of living evidence to gain a better understanding of the principles behind the Homeric epic, Beecroft can make use of the Chinese tradition, in some respects more fully documented than that of ancient Greece, to test some of his hypotheses.

However, this sort of direct inference is rare in the book. The conceptual framework is comparative and intended to apply to both Chinese and Greek sources separately, but there are few cases where Beecroft makes an explicit comparison; when he does, it tends to be at quite a high level of abstraction. This caution about direct comparisons leads to one possible limitation of the book, that the individual chapters in the Greek and Chinese sections of the book (three of each) essentially stand alone as essays in classics and sinology, respectively. There is also an introduction, a conclusion, and one comparative chapter, which do present the case for looking at Greece and China together. Beecroft mentions, for example, “the particular appropriateness of these two literatures to revealing the shifting of relationships between literatures and their political/social environments over the longue durée” (p. 5). In practice, though, the main justification becomes a methodological one: the use of narratives about authorship as a kind of implicit poetics to supplement explicit statements of literary criticism. This methodology does seem very reasonable, but reliance on it as the comparative element also raises the question of whether the sources deserve to be compared on their own terms.

Overall, the book is a thoroughly researched and innovative study, in which close readings of Greek and Chinese sources are placed in a dense conceptual framework, but it also suffers from some serious limitations, particularly in the treatment of Chinese sources. Though this review will focus on...