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

which emerged as a result of their exploration of the world on both the geographical and literary fronts following a major geographic-political transformation of the empire. This cross-field framework is important because it constituted a vital part of the intellectual context in which these literary works were written and read. I investigate spatial imaginaries in literature within this framework in order to explore new meanings, interpretations, and implications of those imaginaries. In addition, many geographical works of the time are no longer available in their original form and can only be gleaned through records or fragments preserved in literary texts. As a result, literature, especially that which concerns space, also offers crucial referential materials through which the contours of the cross-field exchange can be at least partially reconstructed.

Specifically, the cross-field affinity I examine may take various forms in the literary texts under examination. Contemporary geographical advancements often enter literature in the form of awareness, experience, perspective, or knowledge. Sometimes a direct influence is identifiable, for example when authors of literary texts evoke geographical works or terms explicitly to enhance the rhetorical or poetic power of their writing. At other times, contemporary literary and geographical texts intertextualize with each other by sharing similar thematic and stylistic features. When a cartographical perspective, rather than specific knowledge, is involved in literature, the literary texts are often found to exhibit ways of structuring imageries or configuring metaphors that resemble those underlying contemporary maps. In still other cases, literature itself records contemporary geographical explorations on both the collective and individual levels. A thorough examination of these diverse, fluid cross-field relations restores the geographical dimension of the overall intellectual outlook of the time to a greater extent than the surviving geographical materials alone can do. It also gives due attention to both the aesthetic and epistemological significance of the formal elements of literature.