A Unique Edition of Shishuo Xinyu
My research is primarily concerned with texts produced and circulated in the early medieval period from roughly the second to the seventh centuries CE, or the period from the late Han dynasty through the beginning of the Tang dynasty. Warfare and political turmoil typically characterize the era in between these two powerful dynasties. Considered a complicated and unstable time, this time period also witnessed a period of great innovation in terms of literature, historiography, and scholarship. In the simplest terms, the quantity and variety of texts in circulation increased rapidly. Studying the way these and other texts were organized, then, is in part a way to understand how people dealt with this textual excess; the strategies that they used to cope with the ever increasing availability of accumulated textual knowledge is another important area to study. In addition, I am interested in the reception of these texts in later periods—works written to describe or evaluate the contents of these early medieval works, and what these newer texts tell us about how attitudes towards the older works shift over time. Usually it is not possible to consult editions of books that actually date from the early medieval period. Therefore,
