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

In Chinese intellectual traditions, different types and scales of space, place, landscape, and site invited different geographic and literary engagements, and were associated with different social, cultural, and political meanings. In the following chapters, I will delineate the contours of the geography-informed literary semiotics of the various spaces in the mid-Tang era.

The Encounter between Geography and Literature

In terms of its primary intellectual arguments, my book deals with the relationship between geography and literature, and the meaning of this relationship for both sides of that dynamic. Scholarly interest in the interaction between literature and geography has long existed. In our contemporary disciplinary field, this topic can be most easily located under the category of literary geography. Ever since the modern field of literary geography was initiated in the 1970s, there have been abundant academic discussions regarding how the two disciplines can benefit each other. In the following, I would like to engage with these discussions both in the West and in China, so as to illuminate the main methodology of my work, as well as its contribution to broader scholarly trends.

In the 1970s, humanistic geography started to attract attention from geographers as an approach that puts human experience and human subjectivity firmly at the center of geographic studies. In seeking new materials from fields within the humanities, some humanistic geographers found that literature is often “a valuable source for examining more subjectively the sense of place and could provide accounts of personal appreciation and experience of landscape.”¹⁷ While geographers hailed the importance of literary sources in this new field, however, literary scholars remained conspicuously absent from the supposedly joint enterprise for decades. Geographers accomplished much in these years of lonely adventure, but the geography-centered approach has also been criticized for its instrumentalization of literary texts. As Marc Brosseau points out, geographers have mostly used literature to support or provide answers