Event

In the centuries after the fall of the Tang dynasty, readers and scholars shaped the literary legacy of the Tang into new and durable forms that were printed, widely circulated, and influential for centuries. My talk examines this process of shaping the Tang through the lens of High Tang poet Li Bai (701-762), one of the most famous and controversial poets of the Tang dynasty. Li Bai becomes an interesting problem for Song dynasty readers due to the heterodox nature of some of his poetry, his checkered personal past, and his conduct at a fraught moment in Tang political history. But tracing the story of his person and his collection from Tang to Song is not a simple exercise in “reception history” as it is commonly practiced—Li Bai tested the ethically normative models for Tang writers that were being developed around the figures of Du Fu and Han Yu, pushing Song readers to refashion him in multiple competing versions. Understanding how and why these different “avatars” of Li Bai were crafted offers us a window onto new ideals of Tang poetry, Tang poets, and literary value in the context of changing aesthetic and material circumstances of the Tang-Song transition.