Reviewed by: Imitation of the Self: Jiang Yan and Chinese Poetics by Nick Williams Fusheng Wu (bio) Nick Williams. Imitation of the Self: Jiang Yan and Chinese Poetics. The Netherlands: Brill, 2017. ix, 302 pp. Hardcover $144.00, ISBN 978-90-04-28223-0. One of the most enduring legacies of structuralism and post-structuralism is that we, or at least those of us who have been influenced by their perspectives and insights, no longer regard a good poem merely as a Wordsworthian "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," or a natural, transparent linguistic embodiment of a personal intent, as stipulated by the "Great Preface" to the Book of Poetry. A poem is now regarded as an integral part of a literary convention; its meaning production is possible only through complex interactions with other poems, just as a linguistic sign acquires meaning only when it is placed in relation with other signs in a particular language system. As a result, the meaning and significance of a particular poem, just as a linguistic sign, is crisscrossed by echoes and references to other poems. This intertextual nature of a literary text calls into question claims of autonomy in literary production and interpretation. In writing a poem, a poet inevitably invokes earlier poems, if only because his medium has already been used or implicated by other poets. In this broad intertextual perspective, all writings imitate each other, although most of the times this is not the intention of the author. In traditional Chinese poetics, though, the presumed aim of a poetic composition is to convey an experience informed by the personal, historical experience and vision of the poet; the originality, or the lack thereof, of this personal experience is often taken to be the determining factor in its evaluation.1 This is perhaps why Nick Williams calls Jiang Yan's (444–505) imitation poems an "exceptional, somewhat marginal form of writing" (p. 177). Williams' book aims to shift our perspective away from this traditional view, so we may view imitation poetry as "a way of reading that divorces composition and experience, splitting the poetic experience into separate levels of abstraction." As such, according to Williams, "imitation poems themselves are after all one way of reading poetry in the Chinese tradition" (p. 19). Under this mode of reading, what we discover in imitation poetry is no longer a unified authorial voice, but a "double voice," that of "borrowed and original." While this double voice may be a liability in traditional criticism because it is derivative and less original, in Williams' view it is significant because it is "not only a feature of imitation poetry, but a phenomenon of literature itself" (p. 2). Here, the echoes, intentional or not, to structuralism and poststructuralism are hard to miss. Williams' study covers nearly the entire poetic works of Jiang Yan, including both shi and fu, but its focus is the thirty "Poems in Diverse Forms" 雜體詩三十首, which were included in Xiao Tong's 蕭統 Wen xuan 文選. In his preface to these poems, Jiang Yan proudly announces that he wrote them [End Page 411] "to imitate the styles" (斆其文體) of various well-known pentasyllabic poems at his time. He also states that his goal is to "evaluate the source and current" of these poems (品藻淵流). Jiang Yan thus makes clear the intertextuality of these poems at two levels: first, they share stylistics features of the poems that they imitate; second, they are his critical evaluations of these poems. This double intertextuality, at the levels of composition and criticism, leads to Williams' following statement, which sums up his main argument in the book: "Imitation poetry are not just a poetic object of study but also critical interpretations of poetry, identifying genres, styles, and modes of self-presentation for future readers." For this reason, Williams argues, "this study of imitation poetry has some significance for interpretations of Six Dynasties poetry in general" (p. 16). Williams' book consists of two main parts. Part one, "The Development of Imitation Poetry," outlines the evolution of imitation poetry in early medieval culture; part two, "Jiang Yan between Poetry and Life," "examines the paradoxical way in which Jiang Yan's works present a self...