Writing against The State

Book excerpt: This book is about the tension between de facto political power and the claims to intellectual and moral leadership of the shi (‘gentleman class’) in Early Medieval China. Shelun, or Hypothetical Discourse, is a hitherto neglected Chinese literary genre. The author for the first time places the surviving texts against the political background that accounts for its rise and decline in early medieval China. Comprehensively annotated translations of seven Hypothetical Discourses are placed in the context of their authors' lives and times, with an emphasis on the post-Han examples of the genre. This thorough study gives insight into this subgenre of fu by which the world of the Chinese gentleman class finds an always ambiguous expression in the rhyme-prose texts under review.