Antje Richter's Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China offers a comprehensive survey of letter writing in early medieval China. Besides an introduction and a conclusion, this book consists of five chapters, divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials and Concepts of Letter Writing,” comprised of two chapters, addresses the material culture of the period, explores the possible forms a letter could take, and provides “a definition of the personal letter in early medieval China” (p. 12). Part 2, “Epistolary Conventions and Literary Individuality,” turns its focus to the letter itself: its formulaic structure and elements, the common dictions used in the personal letter, and the ability of individual writers to carve their authenticity out of the norm.
Regret about the disappearance of handwriting, especially of handwritten letters, is a common twenty-first-century sentiment. This sentiment is clearly present in Richter's introduction, and in the epigraph to the book, a passage from Franz Kafka's Letters to Milena. All epigraphs in the book, in fact, except those to the introduction and chapter 2, are taken from writers in the Western world. Richter's frequent comparisons of the culture of letter-writing in early medieval China and the Western world place Chinese letter-writing in a global context, and create a “dialogue with contemporary scholars of letter-writing traditions in Europe,” as Cynthia Chennault notes in a quotation printed on the cover of Richter's book.
Letters can be written in various forms, in either poetry or prose. Richter's book focuses on letters written in prose, and she hopes that her study will “add an important new facet to our picture of Chinese literary history, particularly our understanding of the development of prose styles” (p. 153). So what constitutes a “letter”? And what should be its content? Based on an examination of a variety of extant personal letters from the early medieval period, Richter concludes, using the analytical vocabulary of Western epistolary studies, that these letters conventionally “consist of a complete frame”—that is, of an opening (prescript and proem) and a closing (epilogue and postscript) that bracket a “letter body” (p. 75)—even if part of the frame, or even the main body text, appears to be missing from some letters.
According to Richter, this absence of a “letter body” occurs most commonly in “extremely short letters” (apparently a reference to tie) that “consist of little else but opening and closing and apparently lack any ‘real’ communicative intention” (p. 86). She argues that these short letters lack “real communicative intention” because their proem section consists only of “small talk,” such as comments about the weather or the season, descriptions of the author's health, inquiries about the addressee's well-being, or good wishes. Although Richter admits that this “small talk” may contain important “information of personal relevance” (p. 79) as well as “interpersonal concerns” and expressions of affection (p. 86), she denies it “real communicative intention.” If these mundane cares are truly the concerns these letter writers want to write about to their relatives and friends, however, why shouldn't they be regarded as the “real” communicative intention? Especially in a period of adversity and chaos, exchanges between two people about the cares and concerns of daily life—bad weather, illness, missing one another, hopes of a meeting—should not be considered insignificant. On the contrary, such seemingly trivial concerns are poignant reminders that being alive is more important than anything else in a time when people have lost control over their lives.
Richter's designation of tie as a “calligraphic model” (p. 34), moreover, is somewhat misleading. Not only is this meaning of tie (“writings that were appreciated for their calligraphy,” p. 36) a later usage, but the many short, casual letters by Wang Xizhi that Richter cites as examples in her discussion show evident intimacy between the writer and the recipient, and demonstrate authentic emotions on the part of the author. I wish that Richter had dedicated more space to the discussion of this particular epistolary term, and to the transformation of the meaning of this term over time, from “short letter” to “calligraphic model.”
The use of Chinese characters in the book, finally, seems somewhat arbitrary. The introduction, for example, provides Chinese characters for a quoted phrase in the endnotes but not in the main text, whereas the chapters print Chinese characters along with the translations. A more systematic format would have been preferable.
All in all, Richter has written a solid study on letters and epistolary culture in early medieval China. She makes important contributions to the field of early medieval Chinese cultural studies in general, and to the understanding of letters as a genre as well as to the analysis of the textual characteristics of personal letters in particular.
