We also explore the nature of associative thinking underlying source-identification. Does source-making entail a teleological mode of thinking that either privileges or dismisses “sources” in relation to “main” texts, each perceived as self-enclosed entities however embedded in a web of textual relationships? Alternatively, do sources open our eyes to an interconnected textual world in flux, in which “sources” are to be trumped, cannibalized, woven in texts that are always already part of intertexts or hypertexts? Digital Humanities further challenges conventionally conceived concepts such as intertextuality and readerly autonomy by introducing new text mining tools that unveil ever fresh patterns and connections. In this critical landscape, does a view of sources in terms of afterlives warrant new insights in an age of comprehending world literature in transcultural, rhizomic, and cosmopolitan terms?
Xiaoqiao Ling begins by examining how the proximity of texts in circulation compounds our understanding of invention and creation. Early vernacular short stories (huaben) are typically dismissed as haphazard patchworks of disparate textual segments. Anthologized in sixteenth-century miscellanies that fitted texts of different origins in upper and lower panels on a leaf, these stories facilitated serendipitous connections in readers’ minds given the proximity of texts that packaged familiar tropes of romance in novel permutations. Ling argues that such a spatial experience of texts in the book form remained an important appeal of these huaben stories before they were subject to heavy editorial hands from seventeenth-century elite compilers such as Feng Menglong and Ling Mengchu.
Continuing Ling’s inquiries into the huaben tradition, Maria Franca Sibau’s paper seeks to reassess some of the foundational source-tracking scholarship from last century. The assiduous cataloguing and inventorying of huaben sources has kept scholars busy for decades. Typically framed as a necessary and self-evident effort to trace the genre development, such endeavor was not perceived as contradictory with the routine claim that huaben are a quintessential representation of popular culture, nor with the realization that the so-called literary sources may, at times, be parallel or even derivative versions. Focusing on case studies from the seventeenth-century collections Three Words, Exemplary Words, and Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor, Sibau’s paper illustrates not only the complicated crisscrossing of intertextual influences but also the ways in which the stories turn the reader into a source-hunter.
Zhenzhen Lu calls attention to the various modes of textual circulations that problematize the division between texts and sources while foregrounding the materiality of textual mediums. Lu’s paper rethinks the previous approaches to the study of the eighteenth-century masterpiece The Story of the Stone (or Dream of the Red Chamber), whose plethora of handwritten copies have spurred many efforts to identify “authentic” sources and versions and to reconstruct the “original” text of the novel in the absence of authorial manuscripts. Examining anew period sources (including commentaries, anecdotal literature, and book objects themselves), Lu offers important clues into how we might better understand the trajectories of the novel’s travels as “book,” “text” and “source” in the scribal circulation of Qing literature.
Lastly, Paul Vierthaler utilizes digital corpora to re-evaluate new approaches to identify the complex intertextual connections among Ming and Qing works. New computational techniques in source detection help trace direct literary and cultural influence across a large corpus of heterogeneous, premodern Chinese books to measure the accretions of meaning and nuance quotations acquire as they appear across multiple works. This system of shared textual material as a “hypergraph,” in which many texts (“nodes”) are often connected by singular shared threads (“edges”) of influence, not only reveals the most likely origin of a given quotation. More importantly, it enables us to explore the effect that constant reencounters with quotations across variant works may have on readers. It also allows us to confront poems, drama, and other ostensible intertextual moments as cases with NO apparent prior textual antecedent. Delving into the complex ways in which authors leverage prior cultural knowledge for their literary purposes thus highlights moments when authors chose to turn to invention and creation instead.