Abstract:

There are more than twenty biographies in Chapters Nine and Ten of the Collected Works of Idle Living by LI Kai-xian. These biographies include his evaluation of the “Seven Masters of Hongzhi” and “Eight Talents of Jiajing”, secretively forming a textual dialogue with his “Poems on the Nine Masters” and “Poems on the Sixty Masters”. They characterize a special group of literati figures and reflect his awareness of writing a contemporary literary history. However, during the late Jiajing reign, as LI Kai-xian complained, it was difficult for an un-commissioned writer to write a biography for his contemporaries, since the mastery of original materials was always limited to the circulation of books. Therefore, once we discuss the narrative technique of these biographies, it is essential to avoid an open interpretation over the “textual independence, ” but to investigate the writer’s attitude towards different layered historical materials, such as official biographies, literary collections, or hearsays and rumors. The precondition for such an investigation is a careful textual collation on the biographies and their “pretexts.” As a famous dramatist and book collector, LI Kai-xian is passionate about popular literature, thus he actively employs various elements of popular literature into the writing of biographies. Vernacular or fictional languages are applied, oral historical materials are rediscovered under the trend of publishing oral literature, and the new tendency of “appreciation of ugliness” is established based on the commercialization over the literati- these are LI Kai-xian’s useful attempt at writing biographies while encountering a new time of literature.

Key words: LI Kai-xian, biography, layered historical materials, biographies of “today’s Literati”, narrative technique