Informal Talk: Zhenzhen Lu

Pu Songling (1640–1715): The Author as Scribe

Zhenzhen Lu (Bates College)

Pu Songling is known to world literature for his Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from the Studio of Leisure), but he is also outstanding as a rural literary man of his place and time for the large number of manuscripts extant in his hand. They include not only hundreds of folios of his famed classical tales, but also copies of earlier prose and poetry, a compendium of horticultural texts, and a genealogy of the Pu lineage. This talk examines the multiple layers in these manuscripts, from Pu’s insertions and deletions to the presence of other hands, and still to the unbindings and rebindings of the twentieth century that have created lasting puzzles for scholars. I hope the talk will shed light on Pu’s multiple activities as author, reader, compiler, and scribe, and help us think more broadly about the role of manuscript culture in the realm of personal reading and writing in China of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Zhenzhen Lu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese at Bates College (US). She was a researcher at CSMC from 2017–2019, where she worked on the project ‘For Readers and Collectors: Publishing Copies of Works on Demand in Beijing between the Late 18th and the Early 20th Century’ (C10, SFB 950). She is the author of The Vernacular World of Pu Songling: Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China (Brill, forthcoming). During her stay at the CSMC, she plans to further explore the topic of scribal circulation of Chinese vernacular literature, focusing on the case of the novel Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber).