Abstract
A commentary on the poetry of Ruan Ji (210–263), attributed to the eminent fifthcentury writer Shen Yue and incorporated into Li Shan’s edition of the Wenxuan, offers new insight into the interpretation of poetry in early-medieval China. This study presents the commentary in its entirety, identifying and discussing its interpretive strategies and examining its treatment of Ruan Ji’s poetic diction. It suggests that the commentary reveals a way of reading poetry based in the idea of “stimulus” (xing), one of the foundational concepts of classical Chinese poetics, and that as such it can give us a finer understanding of how “expressive-affective poetics,” a key paradigm in the study of Chinese poetry, was realized between the Han and Tang.
Keywords
Ruan Ji, commentary, early-medieval poetics, rhetoric, diction, Wenxuan
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