This dissertation examines the central forms of exegetical authority in early to early medieval China, focusing on the reception history of the Zuo Tradition from Western Han to Western Jin (2nd c. BCE-3rd c. CE). Most modern scholarly works treat the Zuo Tradition as a historical narrative of great literary value about China's Spring and Autumn period (722-468 BCE). My research, however, studies the value and status of this text as an exegetical tradition from the perspective of classicists spanning five centuries. These early scholars on the Zuo Tradition measured its worth according to how well it preserved and explicated the visions of Confucius as lodged in the wording of Annals the Classic. Conceptions about the Zuo Tradition evolved through a series of debates and arguments in expository letters, memorials, and essays, as well as commentaries on the Annals and Zuo Tradition.

During the Western Han (206 BCE-9 CE), the Shiji advanced the conception of the Zuo Tradition as a corrective to the divergent interpretations of the Annals. In late Western Han, Liu Xin (46 BCE-23 CE) vied to establish the Zuo Tradition on equal footing with officially sponsored exegetical traditions. But during early Eastern Han (25-220 CE), the Fan Sheng (fl. 28 CE) versus Chen Yuan (fl. 28 CE) debate showed that doubts remained about the authority of the text as an interpretation of Confucius' messages. Implicitly responding to such doubts, Ban Gu's (32-92) writings elaborated on previous accounts about the authorship, transmission, and official precedence of the Zuo Tradition. During the mid-Eastern Han, Jia Kui (30-101) represented the Zuo Tradition as a source of legitimization for the imperial house, while other scholars added to the myths about the Zuo Tradition. The Western Jin (265-317) scholar Du Yu (222-284) worked to further shore up the text's authority by both redefining conceptions about the Annals and privileging the Zuo Tradition as an exclusive system of interpretation of the Classic.

In the period under study, successive generations of Zuo Tradition scholars made steps to secure its status in a range of ways, all of them aiming to strengthen the text's relationship to the Classic. These incremental steps enabled the Zuo Tradition to attain definitive authority in the early Tang (7th c. CE), allowing us to observe a process fraught with conflicting ideas about the text. Thus the study of this historical process helps to merge the intellectual horizons of modern scholars with those of classicists.

This dissertation gives a new account of the emergence of the concept of individual literary style in China between the 2nd and the 5th centuries CE. It argues that the tendency, new in this period, to posit a stylistic, characterological, calligraphic, and even somatic identity between author and text is best understood as a complex response to 1) innovations in technologies of writing used to produce and copy texts and 2) to changes in the bureaucratic institutions and archives in which these texts circulated and were evaluated. Case studies of three writers—Cai Yong 蔡邕 (133-192), Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210 -263), and Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385–433)—conducted against the background of the distinctive mediascapes in which they worked, reveal that although these writers developed a more author-centered mode of engaging and shaping traditional forms, they did so with the awareness that this new mode of expression foreclosed other, older modes of engaging with the literary past.

Contrary to the notion still widespread in the scholarly literature on this period that early medieval writers began speaking more fully in their own voices in an effort to liberate themselves from constraints imposed by court poetry, I show the emergence of the lyric “I” to have been indexed to the loss of the hallowed institutions and ancient channels of self-cultivation in the wake of dynastic collapse, institutions which obviated the very need to speak as oneself. The melancholy that suffuses the literature of the post-Han period is thus in part the melancholy of having been reduced to speaking in one’s own voice. This loss was the result not only of political fragmentation but also of momentous changes in textual media which threw into question as never before the relationship between text and author.

“Brushwork as Bloodwork” represents the first attempt to take up an ecological approach to textual practice in the early medieval period. As such, it challenges the primarily intellectual-historical approach to the literature of this period, which has tended to view changes in ideas about literature, authorship, and the self as the driving force behind the emergence of a more robust concept of individual literary style. Using a methodological approach derived from of the works of the anthropologist Bruno Latour, this dissertation suggests that only in collaboration with certain physical media and only within a very particular institutional and archival context did authors come to see themselves and others as fully present in the words on the page. By treating the concept of individual literary style not as an epistemological given but as the outcome of this collaboration with new forms of physical media in a historically unique institutional setting, it also contributes to recent discussions of the role material culture and technology play in shaping our conceptual world.

My dissertation situates Six Dynasty landscape poetry within traditions of youlan ("excursion and the panoptic view"), whose generic conventions were codified in medieval literary anthologies and commonplace compendiums. By deploying this medieval category, I bring into focus the relationship between landscape poetry and actual excursion practices such as imperial tours and surveys to prospect land for development. The significance of this approach is that it allows us to contextualize landscape poetry within a broader intellectual history that reaches back to pre-Qin debates about the ruler's use of natural resources, and the political and economic stakes of writing within this tradition in the medieval period. Whereas previous scholars have focused on natural landscape, I call attention to landscaped nature--the manmade parks and engineered playgrounds that were crucial to early Chinese representations of excursion. Using Xie Lingyun (385-433), widely hailed as the progenitor of Chinese landscape poetry, as a case study, I show landscape excursion to be a literary performance organized around imperial impersonation, and a body of practices on the ground that rehearsed and mirrored the authority and functions of the state.

My dissertation investigates Chinese medieval daqu("big suite"), a performance consisting of a succession of musical sections that combines song lyrics with instrumental accompaniment, and includes solo or ensemble dance movements. As one of the major components of court music, the lyrics of daqu provide a valuable window into the often submerged link between text and performance. My dissertation focuses on how the performance texts be taken as a linguistic matrix in which the fossilized remains of performance are preserved and revealed to memory. The first chapter examines the relationship between dance, dance lyrics and performance context. The second chapter provides a general introduction on daqu, from that of the Wei and Jin to the Tang and Song. The third chapter takes daqu compositions by Shi Hao (1106-1194) of the Southern Song as central texts, discussing several issues such as "musical words (yueyu)," medieval court performance, intertextualization and performance context, "roaming transcendents (youxian)" tradition and court performance. In the appendix is an annotated translation on Shi Hao's seven daqu pieces.