Manling Luo's Literati Storytelling in Late Medieval China adopts a new approach to the study of tales and anecdotes collected by literati of the “late medieval” era, here defined as the mid-eighth to the mid-tenth century (p. 4). Luo argues that literati storytelling is best understood as “both a mode of discourse—encompassing casual conversations, narrative poems, and prose accounts—and as a medium of social culture formation” (p. 10). She compares tales and anecdotes across collections and time periods in order to show how this body of material “narrativiz[ed] the desires, anxieties, and perspectives of late medieval scholar-officials” (p. 11). One significant contribution of the book is that it incorporates many little-studied texts by a range of Tang literati; Luo argues that these varied texts can be read collectively as “unofficial, dialogic attempts to construct their shared identity” (p. 12). To delineate this identity, she focuses on what she sees as...

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