唐代以前 商人詩歌 硏究: 移動性과 異質性을 중심으로

Abstract

Poems about merchants have received little attention from scholars of Chinese literature, because first examples of the poetry are few and more importantly both the Confucian view of merchants and aristocratic literary standards mean that they are not considered to have much literary value. This merchant poetry, however, needs to be reconsidered from the modern perspective that has a growing interest in migratory life and strangers in society. In essence, merchants were represented as wandering strangers in ancient Chinese texts even though there were merchants who had settled in the cities. Such an image reveals the writers’ distorted view of these people. I first discuss the origin of the merchant poetry through the reading of Han dynasty poems, including Popular Song 樂府 and “The Nineteen Old Poems” 古詩十九首. Next, I examine the image of merchants as represented in the Western Song 西曲 of the Southern Dynasties, which are compiled in the Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集. Merchants always appear as strangers who stay for a while and then move away, and they are longed after by women of various status. Such a romanticized image reflects the unfulfilled desire of the literati, who were bound to Confucian norms and a static society.