Geographic Area: East & Inner Asia
Jonathan Pettit
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, United States
Xiaofei Tian
Harvard University, United States
Devin Fitzgerald
University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Heng Du
Wellesley College, United States
Jonathan Pettit
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, United States
Kay Duffy (she/her/hers)
University of British Columbia, Canada
This panel examines how medieval East Asian actors conceptualized, constructed, and engaged with “books” in ways that disrupt modern assumptions about textuality, authorship, and material form. Moving beyond the notion of the book as a stable or neutral container of content, we explore it as a performative, interpretive, and contested site of cultural production. Through three focused studies—ranging from the editorial labor of Guo Xiang and Tao Hongjing to the shifting uses of paper, stone, and wood—these papers illuminate how textual meaning, legitimacy, and authority were materially and socially embedded. Fitzgerald’s paper reconstructs a new chronology of textual supports in early medieval China, arguing that media transitions were not linear but shaped by a dynamic interplay among inscriptions, rubbings, woodblocks, and diverse paper substrates. Du reinterprets Guo Xiang’s redaction of the Zhuangzi as a philosophical intervention that foregrounds the paradox of perfecting a “text” in a tradition skeptical of textual fixation. Pettit applies Michel de Certeau’s notion of “scriptural economy” to analyze Tao Hongjing’s editorial strategies, revealing how Daoist revelation was spatially and ideologically reshaped through paratexts, formatting, and voice inscription. Together, these papers call for a rethinking of the category of the “book” in medieval East Asia—not as a fixed object, but as a historically contingent and materially embedded process of shaping knowledge, memory, and religious authority. By recovering this diversity of textual practice, the panel invites broader reflection on how texts mediate meaning across cultures, formats, and epistemologies.
Presenting Author: Devin Fitzgerald – University of California, Los Angeles
Presenting Author: Heng Du – Wellesley College
Presenting Author: Jonathan Pettit – University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
