| The "Nineteen Ancient Poems," a corpus of anonymous poems of the Han Dynasty (202 BC--220 AD), along with the Shi Jing (12th--7th c. BC) and Chuci (3rd c. BC--2nd c. AD), occupies a position as one of the three most important and sublime early poetic classics in Chinese history. In the "Nineteen Ancient Poems" we find the earliest consistent use of pentasyllabic verse and the early formation of normative structural, thematic, and stylistic practices surrounding pentasyllabic verse. For this reason, for fifteen hundred years the "Nineteen Ancient Poems" has been asserted as the beginning of shi, or lyric poetry, arguably the most esteemed literary genre in Chinese history, and the place of the "Nineteen Ancient Poems" in the cultural and literary canon has remained almost completely unchallenged.; Concentrating on the receptive history of the poems and observing the emergence and canonization of the entity of the "Nineteen Ancient Poems," this study views the "Nineteen Ancient Poems" not as a single text of poems but as a concept or as a site of intellectual discourse that resided in the various acts and artifacts of reception following the Han Dynasty. The chronological scope of the study is the period from the second through the early sixth century, a period in which the hermeneutic models offered by various interpretive acts provided permanent bases for readings in subsequent centuries. This study concentrates on four primary acts of poetic reception: the construction of generic terminology, poetic imitation of the poems, interpretation of the poems, and anthology making.; Chapter Two offers translations of the poems, a brief formal analysis of them, and a view of some subsequent directions taken in interpretations of the poems following the period being studied. Chapter Three considers the origins of the poems, the literary climate from which they emerged, and the rise of the term gushi. Chapter Four looks at the effects of acts of imitation upon the poems, focusing in particular on the imitation poems of Lu Ji. Chapter Five offers a study of the Zhong Rong's Shi Pin and the implications of that work on the Ancient Poems. Chapter Six focuses on the Wen Xuan, the formal creation of the "Nineteen Ancient Poems," and the role of the poems in the emerging new views of literature. Chapter Seven looks at the Yutai Xinyong, another repository for the poems, and compares it with the Wen Xuan in search of origins for two main strains of interpretation for the poems. |
