Abstract
Ni Zan, a famous poet living in late Yuan dynasty, wrote two seven-character ancient verses of "Southern Song" and "Jiangnan Spring". Then the two poems were merged into "Jiangnan Spring" and given to his friends as a present. Shen Zhou and other literati in the Wuzhong area began to follow the pattern of "Jiangnan Spring" during the Hongzhi period of the Ming dynasty, treating them as two tunes. During the period of Jiajing, fifty people were involved in the responses and an anthology was complied. The earliest works of Ni Zan and the following responsive verses by Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming were in fact poetry. But in the Jiajing period of the late Ming dynasty, there were differences in understanding the genre, for some took it as poetry, and some as ci. With the expansion of subject matters, the use of rhyme was not strictly regulated, and the "subject" and "tune" were also separated. During the period of Kangxi in the Qing dynasty, "Jiangnan Spring" was regarded as ci, and its inclusion in ci collections such as Yishengchuji and Yaohuaji, facilitated the designation of "Jiangnan Spring" as ci. This situation was further enhanced by the Jiangnan Spring Collection printed in the Guangxu period. This was, again, taken as a matter of fact during the Republic of China in the book Collected Ming-Dynasty Ci-Poems. Because of all those incidents, "Jiangnan Spring" was completely mistaken as ci. The misunderstanding of "Jiangnan Spring"'s genre and following responses had much to do with the history of ci studies in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
First Page
80
Last Page
89
Recommended Citation
Tang, Zhibo. 2017. "From Poetry to Ci: The Misunderstanding of Genre and Responses to "Jiangnan Spring" in the Ming and Qing Dynasties." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 37, (6): pp.80-89. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol37/iss6/12
