Kathyrn Lowry
University of California at Santa Barbara
The generous support from the Friends of the Princeton University Library made it
possible for me to mine the letter collections and writing guides in the Gest Collection
and the East Asian Library over a two-week period in September 2002. The Gest
Collection is remarkably rich in sixteenth and seventeenth century letter collections and
other literary primers procured by I.V.Gillis (the rhyme or reason of his selection is
another project waiting to be done). Collected literary works (wenji), modern reprints
and microfilms in the East Asian Library supplement those materials for practical use.
With access to that range of materials, I made strides in tracing a pattern of involvement
by journeyman editors and elite who printed letters as models for writing and entertaining
reading that provide insight into the private lives and genius of famous men of the age.
I focused on one journeyman editor, Xu Yizhong, who had a hand in three collections of
letters (of an unprecendented nine letter collections) and three fiction collections and
primers in the Gest. Xu Yizhong is the most prolific editor of letter collections and
epistolary manuals, one of six editors I have identified who accord a specific literary
value to personal letters or ?notes?. He is an unknown (except that his name appears on
fiction and letter collections), but I made strides to piece together a picture of his status
and associations with prominent intellectuals in and around Nanjing, the southern capital,
from a preface on a microfilm held in the Gest. The format of guides and dense
interlinear comments, glosses, and marginal notes on style is rich in information and it is
essential to understanding the appeal of such letter collections to readers. The comments
sometimes imitate the look of handwritten comments on manuscript or, conversely, use
bold graphics to identify and objectify different elements for the letter writer: tone,
vocabulary, prose structure, and so on. The diverse annotations on printed letters is the
key to a shift in subject matter and increasing awareness of the artifice of self
presentation, and I reaped valuable information about the scope of commentary and ? as
important ? the ?look? of fictions of the self in letter guides.
Most of my research and reading took place at the Mudd Manuscript Library, where the
staff was extremely helpful and professional and made time there a pleasure, as I waded
through several large volumes of letters each day. During my stay, Martin Heijdra
(Curator of the Gest), Soren Edgren (Director of the RLIN project to index Chinese
books), and Dora C.Y. Ching each went out of their way to provide access to materials on
my list and also to familiarize me with other aspects of the collections. Martin arranged
for me to give an informal talk on the practice of excerpting letters to the Ming Studies
group at Princeton, an onus that provided timely critical feedback on this phase of my
research. The community of East Asian faculty, curators, and staff brought the archives to
life. In particular, challenges to the authenticity of printed letters led me to pinpoint
editorial strategies and visual formats that are idiosyncratic to early 17th century popular
letter collections and that mark the shift in this period to an early modern sensibility. I am
tracing the institution of forms for writing about the self in articles based on the research.
libraryf@princeton.edu
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