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

context at the same time. They are both central objects of investigation; simultaneously, the investigation in one field may be conditioned by theories, perspectives, and knowledge from the other.

In China, the term “literary geography” (wenxue dili 文學地理) was first introduced in 1902 by the modern scholar Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929). In an article titled “A Discussion of the Main Trends in Chinese Geography” (“Zhongguo dili dashi lun” 中國地理大勢論), Liang discusses how literature, art, and scholarship in the northern and southern areas of China took different shape in part due to the different physical and cultural environments in which they were rooted.²³ Liang’s approach to regional literature and culture does not fall neatly into the basket of interdisciplinary literary geography that we have outlined earlier. He used geography as an explanatory factor for the theme and style of various literary works, but he cared little about how literature could improve our understanding of the geographical environment or the literati’s spatial consciousness in the historical periods under discussion. Nevertheless, it does show a leading twentieth-century Chinese intellectual’s awareness of the geographical dimension of China’s cultural and literary history. In terms of the disciplinary history, Liang’s work defined the fundamentals of Chinese literary geography for the following decades. Even today, despite a radical expansion of the field in China, the basic emphasis on the geographic distribution of literary elements across regions remains largely unchanged.

Zou Jianjun 鄒建軍, an important contemporary scholar of Chinese literary geography, has proposed a list of topics that he believes the field ought to include, ranging from the influence of the natural environment on literary writers and phenomena in literary history, to spatial imaginaries in literary works, to the influence of geographic discovery and outer-space exploration on literary texts.²⁴ But his theoretical proposal has yet to find materialization in the practices of academic research. For example, in his book-length study The Study of Literary Geography (Wenxue dilixue yanjiu 文學地理學研究), Zeng Daxing 曾大興 defines the scope of his