Writing and Materiality in China

Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.

Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.

Judith T. Zeitlin is Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Chicago. Lydia H. Liu is Helmut F. Stern Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. Ellen Widmer is Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor of East Asian Studies at Wellesley College. Rania Huntington is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages & Literature, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Kathryn Lowry is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shang Wei is Du Family Professor of Chinese Culture at Columbia University. Emma J. Teng is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sophie Volpp is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Eugene Y. Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University and the founding director of Harvard FAS CAMLab, an initiative that explores the nexus of cognition, art, and media. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is also the art history editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism. His extensive publications range from early Chinese art and archaeology to modern and contemporary Chinese art and cinema. Ellen Widmer is Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor of East Asian Studies at Wellesley College. Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Art History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Catherine Vance Yeh is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Boston University.