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Anna M. Shields is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University. She specializes in classical Chinese literature of the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Northern Song eras. Her research interests include literary history and the emergence of new literary genres and styles in late medieval China; the sociology of literature; and the role of emotions in classical literature. Her first book, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Collection from among the Flowers (Huajian ji), published by the Harvard Asia Center, examined the emergence of the song lyric in a path-breaking anthology. Her second book, One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China, explores the literary performance of friendship in ninth-century China through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts. Her most recent publication is the 2023 co-edited volume (with Gil Raz, Dartmouth College), Religion and Poetry in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (Amsterdam University Press). She has won two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and in 2024 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. At Princeton, she served as Acting Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies in 2018-2019 and Chair from 2020-2024.
How do literary works survive periods of political disintegration and warfare? Who preserved, transported, and reassembled books and libraries in the context of mass migration and the emergence of new states? What can new works from such eras tell us about the history of knowledge? This talk approaches these questions in the transformative period in Chinese history known commonly as the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms,” that stretched from the late ninth-century rebellions that brought down the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the founding of the Song dynasty (N. Song, 960-1127; S. Song, 1127-1279). I first weave together the political, social, and material impacts of the “textual diaspora” that accompanied the human diaspora after the fall of the Tang, considering new incentives for collecting and transmitting books in northern and southern tenth-century regional regimes, including the rise of printing. Then I will explore two of the famous compilation projects of the early Northern Song—the collection of stories Extensive Records of the Taiping Reign (Taiping guangji 太平廣記, comp. 978) and the belletristic anthology Glorious Blossoms of the Literary Garden (Wenyuan yinghua 文苑英華, comp. 982-987) as culminations of new trends in tenth-century knowledge practices, underscoring the outsized influence of southern culture and scholarship on both works. The two great compilations were built on a critical century of book collection and selective preservation of literary works—rather than being “Song” conceptions, they represent distinctive, coherent remappings of the Tang cultural heritage with tenth-century origins.