Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China's literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.

Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text's meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.

Judith T. Zeitlin is Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Chicago.

Lydia H. Liu is Helmut F. Stern Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.

Ellen Widmer is Professor of Chinese Literature at Wesleyan University.

Read More by Lydia H. Liu:

• The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making

Read More by Ellen Widmer:

• From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China
• The Margins of Utopia: Shui-hu hou-chuan and the Literature of Ming Loyalism
• The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China's May Fourth Project
• Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature
• The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China