Textual Forces: The Political Prose of the Three Kingdoms Era

Textual Forces examines how political texts were forces of war, state-building, and inner- and inter-regime communication in early medieval China. Meow Hui Goh shows that these texts acted as vectors: pushing and pulling, stirring and moving, conjuring sensory and emotional affective states that animated individuals and the world around them. Covering prose from different regimes and states, from the battleground and the court, Goh traces the symbiotic relationship among the textual, bodily, and political aspects of Chinese life in the late Han through Three Kingdoms period.

Interweaving literary, historical, and linguistic analysis, Goh offers a new framework for understanding the significance of the political prose of early medieval China. Goh complicates our understanding of textual authority in this era, shifting to a concept of textual forces that shows how these prose works exerted physical and emotive forces to arouse a wide range of reactions beyond political obedience. Textual Forces invites an imagination of premodern China infused as much by the senses, feelings and emotions effected through text as it was by the symbolic power of text.

Meow Hui Goh is Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Sound and Sight.