During a visit to Nanjing University arranged for me by Professor Zhang Hongsheng in May 2005, Tong Ling, then preparing his Ph. D., kindly served as guide for my wife, Professor Sonja Arntzen(classical Japanese literature)and me, meeting us at the airport, taking us to our rooms, and doing all that was necessary to make things convenient and comfortable for us.

Tong Ling and I quickly discovered that we shared many interests in common since we both specialized in the history and analysis of traditional Chinese literary criticism and theory. I was impressed by his enthusiasm and erudition, quite extensive, I thought, for such a young scholar, and what further attracted my attention was his openness to and familiarity with a wide range of Western scholarship on pre-modern Chinese literature and literary thought. Of course, we discussed in particular the internationally influential work of my own teacher, Liu Ruoyu(James J. Y. Liu), with whom I had studied at the University of Chicago and Stanford University and who directed my Stanford Ph. D. dissertation(1971), Wang Shih-chen(1634-1711)as Critic and Poet(Ann Arbor:University Microfilms International, 1979).

We also discovered that we shared much of the same analytical priorities,values, and basic approaches to research and writing:a strong belief in(1)the inseparability of literary history and literary theory,(2)the essential formative cultural-specific basis of both creative literature and literary criticism,(3)the absolute necessity of first-hand philological and linguistic expertise in the study of original texts, and(4)a firm rejection of the notion,popular nowadays in both China and the West, that a wholesale application of Western post-modern literary criticism provides an effective approach to Chinese literary history and literary thought.“Post-ist”methods are often marked by ideological-loaded and reductionist shortcuts to essentialist conclusions, which, though superficially attractive in their critical skepticism and iconoclastic anti-traditionalism, in our opinion impoverish rather than enrich understanding of the texts involved.

Since we go against such trends, our work tends to be historically and philologically detailed, reluctant to make sweeping generalizations, remains unapologetically culturally specific, and allows methods of analysis to grow out of our experience of historical and literary fact and not the result of imitating ready-made systems that anticipate conclusions in advance of the facts. We also read texts for their intrinsic value, as repositories of insight and information that expand and enrich our perception, enhance our emotional and intellectual response to things, increase our ethical engagement, and broaden and deepen our scope of imagination. As such, we respect the integrity of texts, analyze but do not“deconstruct”them:peel them down to a core that reveals the assumed power relationships supposedly underlying them,configured in terms of exploiters and exploited, and the socio-economic factors that supposedly“produce”texts—as if authors were but pawns moved by anonymous forces beyond their control.

“Cultural-specific”does not mean that Tong Ling’s writings, in this book and elsewhere, lack international and comparative significance. Although he writes first, of course, for a Chinese audience, his work also contributes to the disciplines of international sinology and Chinese historical and literary studies, both in the West-North America, the U. K., Europe, Australia and New Zealand-and throughout the rest of Asia, especially Japan, where Tong Ling himself has lived and studied during his graduate student days and where he is now developing a substantial following among Kangaku(Hanxue)circles. Moreover, the“cultural-specific”approach is not founded on the assumption that cultural difference inevitably means cultural dichotomy:China and the West are so different that any comparison is sure to result in distortion and misunderstanding—as if the precepts of“Orientalism”were infallible dogma, and the saying“East is East and West is West”were unquestionably true. Although social and historical discrepancies obviously exist between these two great traditions, discrepancy should not be equated with dichotomy:we firmly believe that the human mind and spirit are broad and flexible enough to understand and appreciate one culture in terms of the other in such a way that integrity on both sides remains intact and new creative insights are consequently produced, casting better light on both.

The subject of this book, Six Dynasties literary criticism, focuses on XiaoZixian(489-537)and his literary criticism, studied in the context of the contemporary and near-contemporary critical and theoretical writings of Xie Lingyun, Xiao Tong, Liu Xie, Zhong Rong, Pei Ziye, and Shen Yue.

The contributions of these six major figures to the development of Chinese literary criticism are well known in the West, with many book and articlelength monographs devoted to them beginning in the 1950s and extending to the present, by James J. Y. Liu, J. Timothy Wixted, Bruce Brooks, Donald Gibbs, James R. Hightower, David R. Knechtges, Donald Holzman, Stephen Owen, Daniel Bryant, Richard B. Mather, Bernhard Füehrer, Pauline Yu,Cai Zong-qi, Tian Xiaofei, Fusheng Wu, and Richard John Lynn, among others. By contrast, Xiao Zixian has been decidedly less translated and studied, though references to him in Western sinology have increased in recent years, with translated and annotated excerpts from Xiao’s Wenxue zhuanlun(Discourse on Biographies of Literary Men), Nan Qi shu(History of the Southern Qi), 52, appearing in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature(Tian Xiaofei, 2010),“Culling Weeds and Selecting Prime Blossoms”(David Knechtges)in Culture and Power in the Chinese Realm,200-600(S. Pearce, A. Spiro, P. Ebrey, ed.,2001), and Sound and Sight:Poetry and Courtier Culture in the Yongming Era(483-493)(Meow Hui Goh, 2010). Translations of Xiao’s poetry are included in Anne Birrell,Games Poets Play:Readings in Medieval Chinese Poetry(2004), and an extensive selection of passages of Xiao’s biographies in the Gaoyi(Lofty Disengagement)section of the Nan Qi shu, 54, is translated and analyzed in Alan J. Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement(2000). Finally, for more than a century, Xiao’s Nan Qi shu has also been referred to, paraphrased, and passages excerpted in translation in dozens of Western studies concerned with the history of the later Six Dynasties era. As such, Xiao Zixian is unquestionably a name familiar to Western scholars of medieval Chinese history,culture, and literature.

However, nothing like Tong Ling’s extensive, detailed, and in-depth study of Xiao exists in the West, covering as it does family background, life and times, Xiao’s thought and its affiliations with Confucianism, Buddhism,and Daoism, as well as the wide scope of his scholarly and literary writings.Moreover, Xiao’s literary criticism is still only treated in fragments inWestern publications, and no Western general history or survey of Chinese literary criticism-including the most important:James J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature(1975)and Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought(1992)-so much as mention Xiao’s name. Therefore, Tong Ling’s work on Xiao is most welcome, for it will undoubtedly have an immediate and lasting impact on international Chinese literary studies as it casts well-focused light on a fascinating and formative period of Chinese literary thought.

Richard John Lynn

Professor Emeritus of Chinese Thought and Literature

University of Toronto

June 2012

Gabriola Island, British Columbia