Spatial Imaginaries in Mid-Tang China: Geography, Cartography, an ...

study as “the geographic distribution, combination, and evolution of literary elements; the regional characteristics and differences of literary elements and the overall shape of literature; the relationship between literature and geography.” His investigation includes how literary writers, schools, activities, styles, and other phenomena are distributed across the different geographic regions in China and are influenced by the regional milieu, and how they have in turn had an impact on regional cultures.²⁵ A Comprehensive Study of Literary Geography (Wenxue dilixue huitong 文學地理學會通) by Yang Yi 楊義 further adds the geographic routes of the dissemination of literary works and influence to the discussion, but the region still works as the basic unit on his map of literary dissemination.²⁶ The regional approach in the study of literary geography primarily takes geography as context and method. It places the focus on the regional geographic environment surrounding literature and adopts analytical tools typically employed in the field of geography, such as phenology, urban design, and so on.

Some other studies, although not framing themselves as literary geography, explore the intertextuality between geographical and literary texts. Among them, two deal with the Tang period. The book by Liao Yifang 廖宜方 on the memory of history in the Tang Dynasty discusses how Tang literati engaged with pre-Tang cultural history in their geographical and literary writing, and how they intertextualized with each other’s works.²⁷ Wang Liqun 王立群, in contrast, studies how geographical writing in the early medieval period informed the emergence of the literary genre of the landscape essay in the mid-Tang period.²⁸ These two works suggest the fluid relationship between geography and Tang literature on a textual level, thus demonstrating refreshing approaches to the study of the interdisciplinary encounter between geography and literature in medieval China. Nevertheless, for a book on cultural history, Liao’s work does little close readings of literary texts in terms of their language and style; while Wang’s book is primarily focused on the literary incorporation of geographical texts produced at a much earlier period, not those from the time.