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Cited by 7Classical Studies and PhilologyChinese history and philosophyDigital Humanities and Scholarship

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 32 of the 32 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Authentication Studies (辨偽學) Methodology and the Polymorphous Text Paradigm

Paul Fischer 方破·2009·Early China
DOI 10.1017/s0362502800000067
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Abstract

The foundation of Chinese intellectual history is a group of texts known as “masters texts” (子書). Many masters texts were authored in the Han dynasty or earlier and many of these have as their title the name of a master who was generally regarded as the author. The inclination to treat a given book as the product of a single writer is apparently a strong one. Nevertheless, from the very beginning there were Chinese scholars who doubted the veracity of the putative authorship of some of these works and suggested that they may in fact have been the product of several authors. Over time, such scholars developed criteria by which to judge the authenticity of ancient masters texts. But as such textual criticism grew more penetrating, the object of its scrutiny began to come apart at the seams. In the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that most early Chinese masters texts were originally quite permeable and that only later were their received forms settled upon. The branch of textual criticism that deals with authenticating early Chinese texts is called “Authentication studies.” This paper is a survey of the methodological advances made in the field of Authentication studies over the last two millennia. It is not a history of the field, as such a history would be a much longer project. The survey concludes with the idea of the “polymorphous text paradigm,” a paradigm that paradoxically obviates much of the preceding scholarship in its own field. Simply put, if authentication relies largely on anachronism, and anachronism relies largely on the dates of the putative author, then a multi-author work with no known “last author” will be impossible to authenticate. Furthermore, the polymorphous text paradigm does not posit these texts as necessarily having earlier and later “layers,” but rather as having had no set structure over the course of their early redactional evolution. This survey examines the contributions of seventeen scholars to Authentication studies methodology, and concludes with how the changes in this field have influenced the work of three modern, Western scholars.

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Research works printed but not linked: 85

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Metadata

Authors
方破, P. F.
Corresponding author
Paul Fischer 方破
Venue
Early China
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2009
Volume
32
Pages
1-43
ISSN
  • 0362-5028 (ISSN-L)
  • 2325-2324
DOI
10.1017/s0362502800000067
OpenAlex
W2587103531
Cited by
7
References
32
Citations by year
2022: 1 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 1
FWCI
0.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 2045 d)
Locations
Early China (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Classical Studies and Philology
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Chinese history and philosophy
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Digital Humanities and Scholarship
Keywords
authorship attribution, anachronism, Han dynasty texts, early Chinese texts, authenticity of ancient texts

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