Writing Communities into Being: The Art of Linked Verse

Abstract

Linked verse (lianju 聯句) is both a unique art form and a social practice, with over a millennium of recorded history in Premodern East Asia. It is produced by two or more poets taking turns supplying “links,” or segments of poetic lines, to expand and respond to the previous poet’s passage. I theorize linked verse as a nexus of social bonding and individual creation, examining how it plays a central role in forging communities in every sense of the word: from intimate friendships and social circles, to a textual microcosm of empire, to articulating romance in fictional representation, and as part of a shared poetic language in the premodern Sinosphere. Chapter One traces the origins of linked verse in early medieval China from the fourth to sixth centuries. It is traditionally believed that two pieces attributed to emperors and ministers are the earliest examples of linked verse; this chapter proposes a more historically grounded lineage of linked verse that grew out of literary collections and anecdotes in standard histories. Chapter Two discusses three sets of linked verse composed during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). I contend that these works demonstrate how linked verse functions as a medium of inscribing space, how the cultural past of a site informs physical experience within such a medium, and how collective authorship is both a harmonious and disjointed endeavor. Chapter Three focuses on linked verse in works of fictional narrative composed between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. This chapter highlights the performative aspect of linked verse; it also draws attention to the fraught question of what it means to write in the voice of others. Chapter Four looks beyond China to examine linked verse composition in premodern Japan and Korea, where it was reinvented in ways that are both similar to and vastly different from its place of origin. I believe this project will contribute both to Chinese poetics and to transnational East Asian studies, as well as address broader questions about human connection and artistic creativity. In an age when communication between cultures becomes ever more crucial, this study is a timely one.