University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 In The yE e Of The elecS tor: Ancient-Style Prose Anthologies In Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) China Timothy Robert Clifford University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Asian History Commons, and the Asian Studies Commons Recommended Citation Clifford, Timothy Robert, "In The yE e Of The eS lector: Ancient-Style Prose Anthologies In Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) China" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2234. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2234 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2234 For more information, please contact [email protected]. In The yE e Of The elecS tor: Ancient-Style Prose Anthologies In Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) China Abstract The ar pid growth of woodblock printing in sixteenth-century China not only transformed wenzhang (“literature”) as a category of knowledge, it also transformed the communities in which knowledge of wenzhang circulated. Twentieth-century scholarship described this event as an expansion of the non-elite reading public coinciding with the ascent of vernacular fiction and performance literature over stagnant classical forms. Because this narrative was designed to serve as a native genealogy for the New Literature Movement, it overlooked the crucial role of guwen (“ancient-style prose,” a term which denoted the everyday style of classical prose used in both preparing for the civil service examinations as well as the social exchange of letters, gravestone inscriptions, and other occasional prose forms among the literati) in early modern literary culture. This dissertation revises that narrative by showing how a diverse range of social actors used anthologies of ancient-style prose to build new forms of literary knowledge and shape new literary publics. In this dissertation, I focus on a corpus of roughly 100 anthologies dating from the early sixteenth century to the fall of the Ming in 1644. I begin with an overview of what a prose anthology was, how and where they were produced, and what kinds of selection strategies their editors employed. I first argue that government schools served as sites for reconstructing a more or less uniform canon of classical prose across the empire, and demonstrate how the figure of the anthologist enabled printers to codify seemingly universal “rules” (fa) of prose for an empire-wide student reading public. Having delineated this process, I then turn to a group of xiaopin (“minor appraisal”) anthologies produced by commercial printers in the Jiangnan region, and argue for reading their contents as a feminized ancient-style prose counter-canon embodying the values of an urban counterculture which valorized women writers. Thus, what twentieth-century scholarship viewed as an encounter between the individual writer and a monolithic tradition is better understood, I argue, as the emergence of an empire-wide student reading public followed by the creation of a print counterculture, in which male anthologists used female prose to signify alterity. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group East Asian Languages & Civilizations First Advisor Victor H. Mair Keywords Anthologies, Books, Education, Ming, Printing, Prose This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2234 Subject Categories Asian History | Asian Studies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2234 IN THE EYE OF THE SELECTOR: ANCIENT-STYLE PROSE ANTHOLOGIES IN MING DYNASTY (1368-1644) CHINA Timothy Robert Clifford A DISSERTATION in East Asian Languages and Civilizations Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation: ______________ Dr. Victor H. Mair, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Graduate Group Chairperson: _________________ Dr. Paul R. Goldin, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Dissertation Committee: Dr. Siyen Fei, Associate Professor of History Dr. Paize Keulemans, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University IN THE EYE OF THE SELECTOR: ANCIENT-STYLE PROSE ANTHOLOGIES IN MING DYNASTY (1368-1644) CHINA COPYRIGHT 2017 Timothy Robert Clifford This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ iii To my teachers iv ACKNOWLEDGMENT This dissertation was possible because of people who find joy in learning and in helping others learn. I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Victor Mair, for encouraging me, supporting me, and inspiring me with a passion for the historical study of language, literature, and culture. I am deeply grateful to Drs. Siyen Fei and Paize Keulemans for the time and effort they dedicated to reading my drafts and listening to my ideas. I thank Drs. Nancy Steinhardt, Paul Goldin, Linda Chance, Ayako Kano, Adam Smith, David Spafford, Cheng Hsiao-wen, Jolyon Thomas, and Christopher Atwood for teaching me, reading my seminar papers, and getting to know me during my time at Penn. I am grateful for the professional expertise and kindness of Linda Greene, Diane Moderski, Peggy Guinan, and Jacqueline Rios. Dr. Catherine Yeh also also deserves my gratitude for first sparking my interest in the topic of this dissertation. Without the work of language teachers I would not have been able to read the sources for this dissertation. I would like to thank Drs. Zhou Xiaoyang, Chang Hsiao- chih, Woo I-Hao, and Huang Weijia for teaching me Mandarin Chinese, Dr. Hu Chirui for teaching me classical Chinese, and Chou Chang-Jen, Xu Zhicheng, and Lin Chiu Fang for giving me the tools to talk about my academic work in Mandarin. At Penn, I am grateful to Drs. Mien-hwa Chiang, Maiheng Shen Dietrich, and Melvin Chih-Jen Lee for mentoring me as teachers, to Dr. Tomoko Takami and Sachie Koizumi for teaching me Japanese, and to Grace Wu for helping me pursue my interest in Taiwanese. v During the research process I relied continually on the expertise and dedication of librarians. First of all, I want to express my gratitude to Drs. Brian Vivier and Molly Des Jardin, whom I count as both scholarly mentors and friends. I thank Dr. Martin Heijdra for his guidance in working with materials from the Gest Collection, as well as his always helpful comments on my chapters. I would also like to thank the staffs of the Firestone Library and Mudd Manuscript Library, the National Central Library, Harvard-Yenching Library, the National Archives of Japan, the National Diet Library, the National Library of China, and Peking University Library for helping me track down and view the primary sources of this dissertation. I had the good fortune to participate in several working groups and conferences which helped immensely during the writing process. Drs. Molly Des Jardin, Scott Enderle, Katie Rawson, and other participants in WORD LAB provided expertise in the digital humanities. John Pollack and the Workshop in the History of Material Texts kept me up to date on new trends in book history. Dr. Wang Sixiang, Holly Stephens, Alex Martin, Rolf Siverson, and other participants in the Choson sources reading group encouraged me think about my materials from a more transnational perspective. Drs. Anne Gerritsen, Guo Yingde, Yu Chiayun, and the Center for Chinese Studies made it possible for me to present my research to scholars from around the globe. I am also deeply grateful to Drs. Anna Shields, Cynthia Brokaw, Alex Des Forges, Hilde De Weerdt, He Yuming, David Wang, Bruce Rusk, Hsu Hong, Liao Kebin, Ts’ao Shu- chuan, and Wang Hung-tai for taking the time to meet with me at various stages and offer advice on my project. vi For the generous financial support I have received as a PhD candidate, I would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania, David Dettman and the Center for East Asian Studies, the George L. Harrison family, the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Program, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I would like to extend particular thanks to Jane Liau, Liao Shiow-Man, Grace Wang, Aurora Lee, Tseng Shu-hsien, and the rest of the Center for Chinese Studies for making my stay in Taipei both enjoyable and productive. Finally, I would like to thank the friends I made as a graduate student at Penn: Drs. Maddie Wilcox, Eiren Shea, Elias Saba, Rebecca Shuang Fu, Ren Sijie, Sophie Wei, Frank Clements, Jeff Rice, Zhao Lu, Ori Tavor, Nathan Hopson, Matt Anderson, Brooke McCorkle, Rachel Epstein, Yang Lei, Zhenzhen Lu, and Annie Chan, as well as Gabrielle Niu, Noa Hegesh, Lu Chiahui, Kelsey Seymour, Holly Stephens, Aliya Sabharwal, Robert Hegwood, Amy Sonneland Hegwood, Yunu Song, Jiyeon Lee, Leo Eisenlohr, Brendan O’Kane, Cathelijne Nuijsink, Thaya Saxby, Debby Huang, Wu Ting-Chih, Hu Xiaobai, Huang Dingru, Gina Elia, Mark Bookman, Zachary Hershey, Petya Andreeva, and Maddalena Poli. I would also like to thank the friends I made from other schools in the U.S. and abroad, especially Drs. Lorenzo Andolfatto, Cao Lin, Liu Tingyu, Xi Lifang, Li Chung-ta, Chiu Yi-hsuan, Hu Qi, Yan Zinan, and Ken Hui, as well as Tom Kelly, Allison Bernard, Susan Su, Chen Jing, and Minoru Takano. vii ABSTRACT IN THE EYE OF THE SELECTOR: ANCIENT-STYLE PROSE ANTHOLOGIES IN MING DYNASTY (1368-1644) CHINA Timothy Robert Clifford Dr. Victor H. Mair The rapid growth of woodblock printing in sixteenth-century China not only transformed wenzhang (“literature”) as a category of knowledge, it also transformed the communities in which knowledge of wenzhang circulated. Twentieth-century scholarship described this event as an expansion of the non-elite reading public coinciding with the ascent of vernacular fiction and performance literature over stagnant classical forms.