Texts and Transformations

Texts ineluctably transform. They undergo transformation as they are recopied, displaced, rebound, reshelved, quoted, summarized, translated, canonized, decanonized, and variously appropriated. And they transform the people who read them, the contexts they enter, the catalogues that list them, the institutions that house them, and the cultures that claim them. Their identity over time is perhaps nothing other than the sum of their transformations. 

The authors in this collection, who are some of the most esteemed scholars of our time, interrogate moments in the long history of East Asian writing at which turning points in the lives of texts become perceptible. Taking Victor Mair’s multidisciplinary research as a common thread, they assess the transforming effect of stories, customs, and “outside” ideas on Chinese civilization over a nearly two-thousand-year period.