Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China

In this book, Alexander Beecroft explores how the earliest poetry in Greece (Homeric epic and lyric) and China (the Canon of Songs) evolved from being local, oral, and anonymous to being textualized, interpreted, and circulated over increasingly wider areas. Beecroft re-examines representations of authorship as found in poetic biographies such as Lives of Homer and the Zuozhuan, and in the works of other philosophical and historical authors like Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Confucius, and Sima Qian. Many of these anecdotes and narratives have long been rejected as spurious or motivated by naïve biographical criticism. Beecroft argues that these texts effectively negotiated the tensions between local and pan-cultural audiences. The figure of the author thus served as a catalyst to a sense of shared cultural identity in both the Greek and Chinese worlds. It also facilitated the emergence of both cultures as the bases for cosmopolitan world orders.

• Brings together the study of the origins of literature and its interpretation in China and Greece
• Provides a methodology for recuperating authors' lives in the ancient world (especially Greece) as texts of incipient literary theory, rather than as naïve biographical criticism
• Provides a model for thinking about different systems of literary circulation in pre-modern times, with implications for contemporary debates on world literature