Title

Exile Literature and the Rise of Landscape Poetryin the Early High Tang: An Analysis Focusing on Zhang Yue and the Zhuying Scholars

Author

Lee Chi-hung

Genre

Article  

Pages

523~561

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

Zhang Yue 張說, Zhuying scholars 珠英學士, exile, court poetry,landscape poetry

Abstract

    This article centers on the Zhuying scholars 珠英學士 and Zhang Yue 張說(667–731), examining the rise of exile literature and landscape poetry, and tracing the transformation of High Tang lyricism. Beginning with the gradual disengagement of court poets from imperially-commissioned poetic contexts, it argues that even outside the court they continued, across displaced locales, to mobilize interpersonal networks and sustain established poetic idioms. Through their poetry, they conveyed encoded professions of loyalty and aspirations for reinstatement, thus exhibiting a tendency to be “detached yet not fully disconnected.” In Zhang Yue’s case, poems of demotion served not only as vehicles of affect but also as instruments of social transaction and political negotiation. Moreover, landscape took on increasing significance within exile poetry: what had once been alien and forbidding terrain became the very object of localized lyrical expression. The key to this transition lay in substituting the despair of exile with the act of excursion (you遊), opening a localized vantage that interlaced perception and affect. The collective outings and poetic exchanges (changhe 唱和), together with the circulation of collections such as Yueyangji 岳陽集, propelled an aesthetic reconfiguration of High Tang poetics. In sum, Zhang Yue’s career vicissitudes and his corpus of exchange poems not only enriched the significance of exile literature, but also fostered the formation of landscape poetry, laying the foundation for the style of the High Tang.