Court Culture and Literature in Early China.

• Author: Kroll, Paul W.
• Position: Book review

Court Culture and Literature in Early China. By DAVID R KNECHTGES. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Burlington, Vt.: ASHGATE PUBLISHING, 2002. Pp. xiii + 280. $124.95.

Although David R. Knechtges's ongoing translation of the sixth-century anthology Wen xuan (Princeton Univ. Press, 3 vols. to date) is the work he is best known for and which has already firmly secured his place in the history of Sinology, he has published over the years a steady stream of articles in journals, symposium volumes, and Festschriften. Fourteen of these articles have now been reprinted in the Ashgate Variorum Series, and we are glad to have them collected in one place. The items selected for inclusion range in publication date from 1972 to 1997. They are centered on texts composed at or about the imperial court, which makes for a cohesive group. The designation "Early China" in the title is due to the principal focus here on Han-dynasty texts, though several of the pieces deal with early medieval (3rd-6th century) works.

The first four articles--"Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju's 'Tall Gate Palace Rhapsody,'" "The Emperor and Literature: Emperor Wu of the Han," "The fu in the Xijing zaji," "The Poetry of an Imperial Concubine: The Favorite Beauty Ban"--discuss different aspects of "Court Literature of the Former Han." The next three items concentrate on a single author, viz., "Yang Xiong, a Court Poet of the Late Western Han." Yang Xiong, a difficult and multi-faceted writer with a complicated personality, was the subject of Knechtges's 1968 doctoral thesis at the University of Washington. The articles on him gathered here--"Narration, Description, and Rhetoric in Yang Shyong's Yeu-lieh fuh: An Essay in Form and Function in the Hann fuh," "Uncovering the Sauce Jar: A Literary Interpretation of Yang Hsiung's Chu Ch'u mei Hsin," "The Liu Hsin/Yang Hsiung Correspondence on the Fang yen"--are on matters supplementary to those examined in the author's first book, The Han Rhapsody: A Study of the Fu of Yang Hsiung (53 B.C.-A.D. 18) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).

Then come five articles on "Themes and Problems in fu Studies." The fact that the fu is no longer a neglected genre of Chinese literary studies is very largely owing to Knechtges's pioneering work in this area. This entails questions in the related...