Longing for Landscape

Longing for Landscape explores the work of famed Chinese poet Su Shi (1037–1101) and his creation of a new song lyric style that culminated during his political exile in the late eleventh century. Su Shi shifted the genre away from its origins in banquet entertainment and toward expressions of longing for place through two tropes of travel. The first was “leisurely strolling,” through which the poet expressed attachment to the present landscape; the second was “imagined travel,” through which the poet sought communion with admired figures in the past.

Employing theories of cultural memory and nostalgia, Benjamin Ridgway traces Su’s tropes to the earlier generation of eleventh-century poets, including Ouyang Xiu, Liu Yong, and Zhang Xian. Further, Ridgway argues that the next generation—the so-called “crossing-south” poets who lived through the Jingkang disaster (1126–1127) and the subsequent collapse of the Northern Song and mass migration to the south—was inspired by Su’s new mode of memory poetics to develop a major strain of song lyrics focused on rootlessness and longing for a lost homeland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Longing for Landscape opens the field of premodern Chinese poetry to comparative approaches in memory and migration studies. By humanizing the plight of involuntary exile or migration, it offers a new perspective on the problems of displacement and longing for contested landscapes that will speak to readers in our own time.