**NOTE UPDATED DATE***
Speaker: Matthew Wild, Preceptor in Literary Sinitic, Harvard University.

This talk examines the poetics of time at the height of Qing empire. It offers a new approach to the work of the Qing poet Huang Jingren (1749–1783) against his subsequent appropriation by early twentieth-century writers who claimed Huang as a proleptic modern Chinese author born to the wrong era. The central focus of discussion will be an overlooked set of ritual songs that Huang Jingren presented to the Qianlong emperor in 1776. Composed in an ancient form called the “Nao song,” these hymns proclaim the glories of the Second Jinchuan War (1771–1776), the longest and most intensive of the famous Qianlong military campaigns. I offer close readings to explore how Huang’s Nao songs exalt the emperor’s Jinchuan conquest by inventing new archaic language, transcribing a quintessentially eighteenth-century event—involving elite Manchu warriors, Jesuit military advisors, advanced ballistics technology, and Tibetan Buddhist tantric rituals—into the sublime symbolic register of remotest time. By taking seriously Huang’s investment in antiquity as a mode for historicizing his present, this talk aims to open a new horizon for the study of Qing literature.

Matthew Wild is Preceptor in Literary Sinitic at Harvard University. His research focuses on classical poetry in Chinese and Literary Sinitic cultures, with special interests in performance, print culture, traditional literary criticism, and the history of textual scholarship. He is preparing a book manuscript titled Singing in Time: Philology and the Lyric Imagination in Eighteenth-Century China, which explores the role of ancient-style poetry within the mid-Qing archaeological and philological movement known as kaozheng, or “evidential scholarship.” He received his BA in Chinese from Reed College and his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Berkeley.