Agenda

Elizabeth Smithrosser, University of Oxford
Joking with the Past in Late Imperial China: The Misadventures of Master Mugwort

This talk will introduce the pseudo-master “Aizi” 艾子, a fictional character and staple of pre-modern Chinese humour compilations. For all the vivacity of his antics and the detail of his interactions with celebrated pre-unification figures, the Warring States (trad. 475–221 BCE) world he inhabits was a retrospectively imagined one: most pre-modern readers in fact understood him to be the creation of literary megastar Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). This original Aizi compilation went on to enjoy a renaissance during the publishing boom of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), most notably giving rise to two sequels. Though composed over half a millennium apart, each of the three compilations exists in dialogue with the concerns of its own times and boasts the individual touch of its respective author. The lecture will introduce the speaker’s recent English-language translation of these works, as well as a reading of the Aizi tradition as granting access to an alternative mode of late imperial engagement with the classical legacy, in particular through its intertextual links to a long history of ambivalent responses to Zhanguo ce 戰國策 (Stratagems of the Warring States).

Biography:
Dr. Elizabeth Smithrosser (沈若白) is a translator and intellectual historian of pre-modern China with research interests in publishing, humour, play, deafness, controversial pasts, and material culture. Trained at SOAS and Oxford, she taught at Leiden and KU Leuven before returning to Oxford in January 2024 as Departmental Lecturer in Chinese. Beyond research and teaching, she has provided academic support for the 2018 twenty-part BBC radio series “Chinese Characters”, written a column on Tang-Song China for Medievalists.net between 2020 and 2022, and serves as multi-lingual copy-editor for the series Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. She is currently preparing a monograph entitled Caustic of Wit: Publishing Humour in Ming China.