Sound and Sight

Poetry and Courtier Culture in the Yongming Era (483-493)

Meow Goh

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780804768597
• eBook ISBN: 9780804775038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This is the first book to examine Chinese poetry and courtier culture using the concept of shengse—sound and sight—which connotes "sensual pleasure." Under the moral and political imperative to avoid or even eliminate representations of sense perception, premodern Chinese commentators treated overt displays of artistry with great suspicion, and their influence is still alive in modern and contemporary constructions of literary and cultural history.

The Yongming poets, who openly extolled "sound and rhymes," have been deemed the main instigators of a poetic trend toward the sensual. Situating them within the court milieu of their day, Meow Hui Goh asks a simple question: What did shengse mean to the Yongming poets? By unraveling the aural and visual experiences encapsulated in their poems, she argues that their pursuit of "sound and sight" reveals a complex confluence of Buddhist influence, Confucian value, and new sociopolitical conditions. Her study challenges the old perception of the Yongming poets and the common practice of reading classical Chinese poems for semantic meaning only.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Conventions
• Prologue - Shengse: Sound and Sight
• ONE - Individual Talent and the “Worthy One”
• TWO - Knowing Sound
• THREE - Seeing a Thing
• FOUR - In the Garden
• FIVE - Leaving the Capital City
• SIX - In and Out of the Landscape
• Epilogue
• Reference Matter
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Character List
• Index