From Tang to Song: Transmissions and Inventions in China’s Middle Period, Volume 1

Introduction

Robert Hymes and Anna M. Shields

Part I: Historiography and Political Thought

1. The Tang-Song Transition in Modern China

Michael Hoeckelmann

2. From the Arts of Governance to the Learning of Emperors: Reading Taizong Mirror Literature

Hilde De Weerdt

3. A Song Sojourner to the Tang Bellosphere: Opposition to Wars of Choice from Tang to Mid-Song

Paul Jakov Smith

4. How the Tang Became “Ancient” (gu 古): Evolving Models of Tang Literary History in the Northern Song

Anna M. Shields

Part II: Literati Identity and Culture

5. Spatial and Cultural Transitions: Voices Tracing the Rise of the Studio in Middle Period China

Yunshuang Zhang

6. Reading Worldview Change from Ghost Stories: Belief (xin 信) in Tang and Song

Robert Hymes

7. Mapping Emotions in the Tang-Song Transition: The Case of Pleasure

Curie Virág

8. Reframing Humor: The Shifting Representation of Banter Culture in Middle Period China

Yung-chang Tung

9. Reprographics in the Tang-Song Transition

Jeffrey Moser

Part III: Art and Visual Culture

10. The Tang-Song Transition through the Lens of Buddhist Patronage at Dunhuang

Imre Galambos and Michelle C. Wang

11. Thinking about Painting, as Expressed in Poetry: Three Stages

Ronald Egan

12. Looking at Pictures: Imagining Vision and Visualizing Mimesis in Collections of Painters’ Biographies across the Tang-Song Transition

Ari Daniel Levine

Biography

Robert Hymes is Carpentier Professor of Chinese history at Columbia University. His work has focused on the social and cultural history of middle period China, studying elite culture, family and kinship, religion, and medicine among other topics. He is currently pursuing two projects, on the East Asian origins of the Black Death and on the problem of “belief” in the middle period. His monographs Statesmen and Gentlemen (1986) and Way and Byway (2002) won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.

Anna M. Shields is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University, and her work focuses on Tang, tenth century, and Song literature and literary history. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Religion and Literature in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (with Gil Raz, 2023), and “Avatars of Li Bai: Producing Tang Poets in the Northern Song Dynasty,” forthcoming in Imperial Authority and Cultures of Learning in Byzantium and Tang and Song China.