Authorship and Text-Making in Early China.

• Author: Du, Heng

Authorship and Text-Making in Early China. By HANMO ZHANG. Library of Sinology. Berlin: DE GRUYTER MOUTON, 2018. Pp. xii + 363. $57.99.

As Hanmo Zhang foregrounds in Authorship and Text-Making in Early China, authorship is at the heart of the millennia-long exegetical tradition of early Chinese texts. In addition to the prominence of biographical reading, a significant portion of existing scholarship, known as "authenticity studies" (bianwei xue), aims at identifying apocrypha within a supposed oeuvre. In recent decades, manuscript discoveries have further spotlighted the questions surrounding author attributions, reanimating the "doubting antiquity" debate of the early twentieth century. Many scholars now view early Chinese texts as composites of existing textual building blocks--not unlike many other early textual traditions represented in JAOS--rather than the individual works of ingenious minds. Why and how then, did these writings nevertheless become associated with putative authors such as Confucius? This is the question Zhang set out to answer.

The methodological invocation of this monograph--further expanding earlier proposals by Mark Edward Lewis and Alexander Beecroft--is important and timely. Rather than asserting or denying the validity of early author attribution, Zhang seeks to identify the functions served by ascribing authors to texts in early China (defined as 770 BCE-9 CE, see p. 6) so as to recover the texts' historical meanings and consequences. Through four case studies Zhang illustrates that while "author" in contemporary parlance is nearly synonymous with "creator" (or other terms associated with the process of creation, such as "writer"), the designation of the originator was not a primary concern in early Chinese textual production. Instead, attributing texts to author figures served to impose unity and integrity as well as to dictate classification and interpretation. As the title suggests, texts and authors in early China were as mutually dependent (p. 290) as chicken and egg, where the amalgamation of heterogenous materials into a single compilation was facilitated by author-making, while the transformation of mythical or historical individuals into authors was partly motivated by the requirement of text-making.

The body chapters present what Zhang considers four distinctive models of authorship in early China: the Yellow Emperor exemplifies an author figure as a cultural hero (chapter 2); Confucius, the head of...