Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning: Shamanistic Religious Influences on Chinese Literary Tradition

"This is a masterful study of the Elegies of Chu (Chuci), particularly of the foregrounding that ancient collection of Chinese songs and shamanistic incantations gives to the function of the human 'soul' in life and the afterlife, and the many ways the hauntingly beautiful and, at the same time, vexingly indeterminate Elegies has been appropriated and re-created through some two thousand years of later Chinese poetry. To treat in one book such a range of chronological periods and literary genres as these texts represent is a tour de force. Very few scholars working in premodern Chinese literature would dare to undertake such a study; and it is hard to think of anyone else who could do it so well." —Ronald Egan, Stanford University

“Soul summoning was an ancient Chinese ritual that served as a subject of early poetry and evolved into an enduring poetic motif. In his monograph Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning, Nicholas Williams starts his investigation with the soul of Qu Yuan in the Elegies of Chu (Chuci), and traces the summoning of souls in the ensuing literary tradition of the fu (rhapsodies) of Liu Xiang, Liu Zongyuan’s imitations of the Chuci style, Wu Wenying’s ci-lyrics, Tang Xianzu’s drama scripts, and You Tong’s shi poems. This is a fine example of religio-literary scholarship in the vein of Arthur Waley, David Hawkes, and Paul W. Kroll.” —Timothy Wai Keung Chan, Hong Kong Baptist University

"A splendid panorama of Chinese 'soul searching' across the dynasties, from Qu Yuan (d. 278 BCE) to Yang Lian (b. 1955), this book provides fine translations of Classical poetry and new insights into literary, religious and philosophical topics, often uncharted by Western sinology so far. A learned, densely referenced yet always engaging and eminently readable study of the changing concepts of the two Chinese souls, Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning is an excellent contribution to the fields of Chinese literary and religious histories." —Wolfgang Behr, University of Zurich