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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
The authorial preface (xu) to an author’s literary works became an important form of self-writing in early imperial and early medieval China. Mainly concerned with their author’s political persuasions and literary intentions, prefaces have long been mined for information about a writer’s intellectual life and their ways of constructing identity. Occasionally, authors also chose to incorporate representations of illness and healing into these self-narratives, an aspect that has so far not been studied but deserves our attention because it promises insight into social, cultural, and literary developments of the period. In this talk, I explore explicit illness narratives as well as oblique references to the author’s physicality in prefatorial paratexts transmitted from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE, mainly focusing on prefaces by Sima Qian (to Shi ji), Wang Chong (to Lun heng), Cao Pi (to Dian lun), Ge Hong (to Baopuzi), and Xiao Yi (to Jinlouzi). I read these and other authors’ fragmentary “autopathographies” not as self-revelations per se, but as serving the overall rhetorical strategy of the preface in question. Examining the intertextual relations between these prefaces, and thus also the historical evolution of the genre, reveals a change in literary conventions regarding first-person illness narratives: it demonstrates the increasing acceptance of illness and physicality as part of an author’s self-image and public persona and as subjects of refined literature (wen).
Antje Richter
University of Colorado Boulder