Michael Fuller's Drifting among Rivers and Lakes details the gradual but inevitable path classical Chinese poetry took in the 150 years from the late Northern Song to the end of the Southern Song to renegotiate its terms of existence against the ascendance of Daoxue (“the Learning of the Way”). This was a battle for survival, with age-old poetic principles and practices intensely vying with Daoxue's new mode of signification that tried to eradicate the aesthetic grounding of poetry and submit it into a morally sanctioned universal pattern of meaning production. Fuller reveals and delineates the ways in which poets and writers from this period reasserted the particularity of classical poetry as a counterforce to the increasingly dominant Daoxue discourse of generality. He comes to the conclusion that toward the end of the period, poetry and Daoxue reached a complementarity in which neither was self-sufficient. The result was a kind of poetry that was both morally engaged and firmly rooted in the particularities of the phenomenal world, a result that, Fuller argues, had important implications for the late imperial period. The book is a massive effort to provide an intense, extended look at this crucial period in Chinese poetic and literary history and as such it offers a well-researched case of “the constant reshaping of the relationship between literary and other forms of textual practice” (p. 28). Fuller has succeeded and produced a fundamental, much-needed text not only for specialists of Southern Song poetry but also for scholars of Chinese history and literature in general.

The book offers an ambitious analysis of the dynamics of change during the particular moment of Southern Song intellectual and literary history, set in a strong undercurrent in which the author frequently (especially in the beginning chapters) muses about the meaning and possibility of general history and common human identity, arguing that general literary history and theory need to engage the particular experience of Chinese literature. From this perspective, the book can be read as a statement of the author's implicit but impassioned agreement with his twelfth- and thirteenth-century poetic protagonists who, like Fuller, strenuously if often implicitly defended the continued relevance and efficacy of poetry—conceived of as an “empirical record of human experience” (p. 10)—in the post-Daoxue era of high, universal moralism. One particular pleasure of reading this rich work is Fuller's concise and often insightful analysis of the many poems created by writers from this period, which constitute the bedrock of his broader argument about literary history. Despite the gloomy intellectual atmosphere in which the intense twelfth- and thirteenth-century poetic struggle was conducted, these intimate readings of poems shine through the 500 pages of the book, providing a luminous focal point for readers separated from their creation by 800 years and helping them perceive the personal stakes, both intellectual and emotional, in this struggle. It is also to the author's great credit that he does not present his poetic protagonists as passive responders to the social and intellectual changes they faced but gives due attention to their active participation in the construction of the new literary and cultural synthesis that emerged at the end of the period.

After setting the stage for this lengthy and heroic struggle in the first four chapters, Fuller devotes the remaining six chapters to the discussion of three successive generations of writers who epitomized both continuity and change. In chapters 5 and 6, he shows how mid- and late-twelfth-century poets represented by Yang Wanli (1127–1206) and Lu You (1125–1209) laid the foundation for the development of a more dynamic and diverse model of poetry that placed greater emphasis than its prominent Jiangxi predecessors on the particularities of personal experience with the phenomenal world. This new poetry enabled the younger generation of writers in the first half of the thirteenth century, represented successively by the Four Lings of Yongjia and the Rivers and Lakes poets (chapters 9 and 10), to pursue more fully and unrestrictedly the new emphasis on individual observation empowered by their general acceptance of the increasing Daoxue demand for moral rootedness in poetry. (The increasing power and influence of the Daoxue movement during this period is treated in the two intervening chapters, chapters 7 and 8.)

All these new developments, in Fuller's account, led to and converged in the eventual, fateful creation of the “inner compass” of Wen Tianxiang (1236–83), the end-of-the-dynasty loyalist statesman and rejuvenated poet who churned out two influential collections of morally meaningful and emotionally charged poetry toward the end of his life. Fuller interprets this “inner compass” as a “returning home” (p. 479) to the moral roots of early and medieval poetry, as articulated most succinctly by the ancient formula “Shi yan zhi” (“Poetry articulates aims”). This is a great point. It is not clear, however, whether this return was the result of the gradual changes Fuller meticulously discusses in the previous chapters of the book, or whether it was occasioned by the particular, dramatic circumstances of Wen's life in the throes of a brutal dynastic transition.