Scholars of early medieval China have long viewed an understanding of the Liang dynasty as incidental to an appreciation of serious literary history, and they point to Liang Palace Style poetry as both the cause and the consequence of the dynasty's famed decadence. In Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang, Xiaofei Tian embarks on an important and needed project: to reexamine this much-maligned period, especially its poetry, and to expose the weighty underside of its alleged superfluousness. Putting her study of the period in a broad historical context, the author has two main concerns: to call attention to the cultural vibrancy of the Liang and to expose the ideologies that have obscured the period's true cultural significance.

Divided into eight chapters, the work proceeds in a roughly chronological manner. Chapter 1 takes up the political and cultural legacy of Emperor Wu (Liang Wudi, r. 502–49). In addition to exploring his contributions to medieval Chinese Buddhism, the author examines how his ability to merge political and cultural priorities helped create fertile conditions for significant literary production. Chapter 2 focuses on Liang manuscript culture and the ways in which book production and transmission organized and “fixed” texts while helping the lower gentry gain entrance into the literary scene and positions of social influence. In chapter 3, the author takes issue with attempts to assign Liang poetry to different “schools,” and she argues that categorical distinctions perceived in the poetry of Princes Xiao Tong (501–31) and Xiao Gang (503–51) are ideologically driven divisions that obscure the real aesthetic complexity of the brothers' work.

In chapter 4, the author asserts that the idea of “superfluity,” rather than describing Palace Style poetry itself, points instead to the place of this poetry within the literary canon, where it both occupies and operates outside of and thus makes visible the ideological limits of a “totalizing cultural system” (p. 10). Chapter 5 explores Liang poetry about candles, and the author shows how poetic play with light and shadow reveals against the backdrop of palace luxury a new, Buddhist understanding of the ephemerality of the phenomenal world. In a similar vein, chapter 6 analyzes the life and work of Prince Xiao Gang and demonstrates that the prince, far from being merely concerned with titillating scenes of the boudoir, actually crafted his poems to explore the impermanence of such scenes. Chapter 7 examines how representations of the North and South in early medieval literature were largely cultural constructions that Liang poetic discourse helped fix in the cultural imagination. In chapter 8, the author investigates the poetry of Shen Jiong (502–60), Yan Zhitui (ca. 531–91), and Yu Xin (513–81)—three survivors of the fall of the Liang who experienced separation from the Southland differently, but whose writing collectively reveals the complexity of the literary response to destruction and tragedy. The epilogue not only looks at the Liang, but also at Tang dynasty perceptions of the Liang, especially how late Tang writers read in Liang decadence and collapse the elegy they might have written for their own times.

The author makes a significant contribution to the field of early medieval studies, especially early medieval poetry. The author has made it possible to take this period seriously and to make consideration of its legacy necessary to an accurate understanding of the literary cultures of the Southern dynasties and the Tang. If this work has any limitations, I would find it in the author's choice to restrict her analysis primarily to pentasyllabic poetry. Pentasyllabic verse was a dominant genre by the Liang (p. 4), and the author recognizes the need to consider the larger textual culture when examining Liang literature. Nevertheless, poetry composition remained only one of many different kinds of literary activity in which the elite engaged during the early medieval period. That Liang literati produced as much textual criticism and classical commentary as they did poetry suggests that a consideration of Liang literary culture could benefit from a more extended look at all the ways in which they engaged with texts. For example, what was it about Liang classical scholarship, now largely lost, that later critics not only deemed decadent, but made it unworthy even of transmission? In the face of such textual forgetting, what does the existence of Liang poetry mean to discussions of its cultural “usefulness”? A thorough study of the cultural memory of the Liang, not just its historical reality, would add considerably to our understanding of the Liang's significance. In all, however, this is the work of a very careful, thoughtful scholar and should be read by any scholar of early medieval China.