Self-Perception and Identity 107
text, we can also situate the Genealogy within its historical and cul-
tural context. Specifically, I am interested in the genre Zhao chose
to convey his information.
Those versed in the various genres of literature employed by the
Chinese literary elite from the twelfth century on will immediately
find Zhao’s text to be simultaneously familiar and surprising. It is
familiar, of course, because the way in which Zhao structured his
work—namely, as a genealogy of intellectual descent—is neither
original nor unusual. Indeed, in Zhao’s time, this genre was argua-
bly at the height of its popularity. Although the genre had existed
since before the twelfth century, we see more instances of it during
the seventeenth century than during any other period of Chinese
history. As Thomas Wilson has observed, the intensification we
see in the production of such biographical genealogical writings
was linked to the state’s co-option of the genre and reflected efforts
to combat that co-option: “These works... by the [time of the]
Ming dynasty, had become a significant instrument in the propaga-
tion of state orthodoxy. Beginning in the seventeenth century, op-
ponents of orthodoxy compiled anthologies organized into chap-
ters of biographies on individual Confucians... or contending
Confucian schools... although orthodox Confucians also com-
piled biographical anthologies.”^65
Wilson is quite right in pointing out, however, that what oc-
curred in the seventeenth century was not so much a proliferation
of discrete instances of a specific sort of text as a multiplication of
myriad variations within a broadly construed genre of literature.
As he carefully notes, “This conception of the genre is formally
variable and historically open in at least two senses. First, there is
no founding text that establishes a taxonomy of formal characteris-
tics to which all subsequent texts must conform or that engenders
its own descendants.... Second, this conception of the genre en-
ables us to see how and where Confucian anthologies overlap with
other kinds of signifying practices.”^66
Although Wilson is willing to grant a fairly high degree of flexi-
bility and variation within the genre itself, he nevertheless consis-
—————
65. Wilson, Genealogy of the Way, p. 5.
66. Ibid., pp. 5 – 6.