Kempf Fund Lecture: Rewriting Tang Literati Lives: New Views of Literary Composition in Biographies of the New Tang History
The Tang dynasty is unique in the Chinese historiographical tradition for having two complete dynastic histories, the Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書 (Old Tang History, comp. 945) and its Northern Song revision, the Xin Tang shu (New Tang History, comp. 1060). Song historian Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007-1072) famously streamlined the basic annals (benji 本紀) by two-thirds in order to clarify the moral lessons of Tang history. Though his cuts were not as extreme, in revising the Tang biographies, fellow historian Song Qi 宋祁 (998-1061) also sought to make the successes and failures of individuals more instructive by pruning material he saw as unnecessary and adding passages to underscore his conclusions. In this process of sharpening the didactic points of the biographies, Song Qi also redefined the role of literary composition (wenzhang 文章) in Tang culture, portraying it as a political tool above all else. This talk will explore the Northern Song context for Song Qi’s new views of literary composition and will look at the impact of his revisions on the biographies of two prominent Tang writers, Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773-819) and Bai Juyi 白居易 (772-846). The Xin Tang shu biographies went on to influence centuries of readers of Tang literature—but, as I will show, their collective portrait of literary composition rewrote Northern Song ideological and political concerns into the historical account of the Tang.