Hosted by UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, the talk “Composing Courtesy: Understanding Envoy Poetry in Early Modern East Asia” 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.
Speaker: Dr. Wiebke Denecke
Location: Zoom – The Zoom link will be sent to registrants.
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?
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