Print and Transnational Referentiality

Abstract

When the scholar-official Nam Kong-ch’ŏl published his collection of writings titled Kŭmnŭng chip in 1815, he deliberately modeled it, in terms of its physical format, after the 1643 imprint of Muzhai Chuxue ji by the early Qing poet Qian Qianyi. Why did he choose to replicate the materiality of Qian Qianyi’s book in making his own imprint? Challenging the assumption that Kŭmnŭng chip was the result of Nam Kong-ch’ŏl’s blind admiration for the Qing culture, this chapter locates his publishing endeavor within a larger change in Chosŏn printing practices initiated by Chosŏn Korea’s active trade in books and objects with Qing China and argues that he used printing not merely as a technology of dissemination but also as an expressive medium of generating meaning beyond the text itself, by alluding to Qian Qianyi’s book as an abiding point of reference. Nam Kong-ch’ŏl’s Kŭmnŭng chip thus served as a material medium of transnational referentiality, the meaning of which derived from the simultaneity of shared literary and material culture in the eighteenth-century Sinographic sphere.