Picturing the Yangzi River in Southern Song China (1127--1279).
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation presents a study of Southern Song dynasty 1127-1279) handscroll paintings depicting the Yangzi River. I focus on three long handscrolls that offer detailed, continuous views of scenery along either the rivers entire course or large stretches of it and that feature inscribed place names. These Yangzi River handscrolls have been recognized as the earliest extant depictions of the river and as among the earliest extant Chinese topographical landscape paintings in a portable format. My study disassociates the paintings from the role of passive documents of physical reality assigned to them in existing scholarship and instead situates them within a larger field of inquiry to show how topographical landscape painting interacts with other cultural practices in the production of geographical knowledge. The Southern Song dynasty 1127-1279) was a time of intense engagements with historical and cultural geography and a time of new articulations of ordering and representing geographical knowledge in a variety of textual and visual media and genres that include encyclopedias, atlases and maps, illustrated) local and comprehensive gazetteers, travel writing, and poetry. One result of my investigation is to identify different cultural milieus and agendas for the production of the individual Yangzi River handscrolls and the range of significances associated with the river and its depiction within the framework of cultural and historical geography. Chapter One shows, based on textual sources, that the Yangzi River became a popular subject in painting during the 13th century and studies the themes associated with it at the time, which include returning home and farewell, a historical interest in sites and regions, and political sentiments. Chapter Two offers a stylistic and connoisseurly analysis of three early extant Yangzi River handscrolls that I combine with an account of their history of reception. Chapter Three continues with a close visual analysis of the three scrolls representational strategies and the role of the inscribed place names. I situate these observations within a larger examination of visual and textual representations of place and region in painting, cartography, printed illustrations, local and comprehensive gazetteers, travelogues, and poetic articulations of personal and political geographies. First of all, I show that the category of topographical painting used in modern scholarship has no equivalent in historical categorizations of Chinese painting. In addition, distinctions between landscape painting, maps, and gazetteer illustrations were not consistently made but rather depended on individual contexts, agendas, and their respective systems of categorizations. Secondly, based on the close visual analysis of the Yangzi River handscrolls in relation to supporting visual and textual sources, I conclude that the three individual handscrolls belong to the three different realms of a) official, imperial geography； b) local historical geography； and c) personal geography of notable sites. These distinctions are crucial in re-examining previous assumptions about the shared function and context of production of the early Yangzi River handscrolls, which are based on their shared subject matter and superficial visual similarities. Chapter Four further broadens the discussion of the Yangzi Rivers significance during the Southern Song dynasty by investigating the four notions of the river as a means to order the country, the river as itinerary, the river as boundary, and the river as an accumulation of pictorial sites.