CURRENTS: Anna Shields on Tang Dynasty Literary Culture

I am in the early stages of a new project on constructions of Tang dynasty (617-907) literary culture that were written during the Five Dynasties (907-976) and Northern Song (976-1127) eras in China. In this project, I will explore key works about Tang writers and literature from the tenth through early twelfth centuries — focusing on historical biographies, poetry anthologies, and anecdote collections. As the earliest, most influential portraits of Tang literary culture for later Chinese readers, these texts represent the Tang as the ultimate “literary” dynasty, reading Tang literature and writers through an increasingly narrow lens that frequently excluded the social and political dimensions of Tang writing. For my talk, I will present a case study of funerary texts for the mid-Tang literatus Han Yu (768-824) that were used by tenth- and eleventh-century historians to write Han’s biography, showing the ways that later writers selected and erased certain components of the texts to construct a “Han Yu” that suited their broader view of the mid-Tang era. 

Teresa Foster, Language, Literacy and Culture

Women adjudged guilty of a felony and condemned to death could avoid the hangman’s noose by “pleading the belly” in eighteenth-century Britain. The respite of precious months offered by pregnancy was sufficient to receive a conditional pardon for transportation to the American colonies. The desirability of convict transportation as an alternative punishment to public hanging may appear obvious. However, much less obvious is the maternal sacrifice required of postpartum women forced to abandon their newborns to an uncertain fate. Removed by prison or parish officials, the children of convict mothers became fictive orphans. I argue that an examination of familial relations within the system of convict transportation reveals a codified pattern of gendered dehumanization through an abrogation of natal ties. 

Talks begin at noon (with lunch served at 11:30)