Speaker: Dr. Wiebke Denecke
Location: Zoom – The Zoom link will be sent to registrants.
How to register? Please fill out a form here: https://ckr.iar.ubc.ca/monday-
More details are included in the attached file. All of our seminars are open to the public!
Event Poster
Talk Summary: This talk focuses on envoy poetry from early modern East Asia, in particular on Collections of Magnificent Flowers (Hwanghwajip), a large corpus of officially compiled poetry anthologies from the missions the Ming court sent to Chosŏn Korea between 1450 and 1633; and several 18th-century poetry collections from Korea’s t’ongsinsa missions to Japan. In cross-cultural perspective East Asia’s envoy poetry is a highly distinctive phenomenon: during their encounters envoys communicated in the scripta (rather than lingua) franca of Literary Sinitic through “brush talk” on paper; they were Confucian literati eager to display their talent in collective poetry composition on set topics and shared rhyme schemes; and they learnt how to play with a common set of themes and tropes to convey courtesy and conviviality. How do the literary repertoires differ in Ming-Chosŏn and Chosŏn-Tokugawa envoy poetry collections and why? How did current events and evolving political constellations affect this rather formulaic poetry? Ultimately this lecture aims to understand the role of envoy poetry in the history of early modern East Asia and develop a comparative framework for understanding the phenomenon of envoy poetry in cross-cultural perspective.
