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  • Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song by Yugen Wang
  • Xiaoshan Yang
Yugen Wang. Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. Pp. ix + 285. ISBN 978-0674062559.

The assiduous exploration and ardent affirmation of fa 法 (skills, methods, rules, laws, models) by Huang Tingjian and his followers known as the Jiangxi School represented a significant shift in critical discourse on poetry in the late eleventh century. Yugen Wang’s book situates this shift in its broad cultural as well literary contexts and argues that the search for poetic methods was driven by a “desire to find an essential new way of reading and writing, to empower the reader with the necessary tools to go beyond the surfaces of texts, into the underlying forces and structures that animate them, and to provide the writer with a roadmap that will effectively guide him through the strenuous and multifarious stages of poetic composition, from the conception of an idea to its full manifestation in a poem.” The primary goal of the book is to “describe and delineate this new way of reading and writing” (p. 2).

In the Introduction, Wang adumbrates some key issues in the book, including various meanings of fa in historical perspective, the search for the source of poetic compositions, poetic allusions and their implications, methods and originality, and the rapid development of print technology. Each of the five chapters that follow addresses an important aspect of Huang’s poetics in relation to the intellectual trends and material culture of the late Northern Song. Chapter 1 traces the eleventh-century quest for models of poetic perfection. It describes how that quest culminated in the canonization of Du Fu as the supreme master by Huang and the Jiangxi School and examines the development of Huang’s poetics as an integral part of the contemporary quest for model and identity. [End Page 384]

The next two chapters deal with the central idea of fa in Huang’s poetics. Building on his historically informed semantic investigation from the Introduction, Wang discusses in Chapter 2 Huang’s conception of fa as relating to both writers and readers of poetry. For the former, fa is the force that animates and guides the process of poetic compositions; for the latter, it serves as the standard for evaluating poetic excellence. As Wang puts it, the elevation of fa not only forms the core of Huang’s poetics but also represents the consummation of a long process in Chinese literary criticism, a process that started in Tang manuals of poetic techniques but did not become fully developed in mainstream critical discourse until the late Northern Song. In Chapter 3, Wang moves beyond technical considerations and examines Huang’s discourse on fa in its intellectual and cultural contexts. He demonstrates how, for Huang, fa as techniques and methods are part of a larger process whose ultimate goal is to eliminate all traces of their application.

Chapter 4 is concerned with Huang’s theory on the nurturing of writerly capabilities and focuses on the reading and study of books as a special type of literary self-cultivation. Wang makes the point that reading for Huang is not just a supplementary (albeit necessary) activity but a direct source or inspiration of poetic composition. In tandem with this reconceptualization of reading is Huang’s shifting emphasis from the breadth to the depth and thoroughness of reading. Such a shift was rooted in the intellectual and material culture of the day.

Chapter 5 is most fascinating. Many themes in the previous chapters are reexamined in light of the rapid development of printing in the eleventh century, including the belief that in the works of great poets every word has a textual source or precedent, that reading earlier texts is an indispensible training for would-be poets, and that poetic inspiration originates in books rather than stimulation from the external world. Through a number of case studies, Wang aims to portray the changing perceptions of and discourse on printed books and how the practice of copying...

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