A|b: Auto | Biography Studies, Volume 41, Issue 2 (2026) (Special Issue) Writing the Self: Autobiographical Traditions in Premodern Asia 《书写自我：古代亚洲的自传传统》 缪晓静 马修（Matthew Wells） 编 出版日期：2026年8月17日
编者简介
缪晓静，科罗拉多大学博士，香港大学中文学院助理教授。其研究关注中国中古时期的诸多议题，包括自我书写、真与诚、唐代诗歌、代笔及史学书写等等。部分研究成果见于《美国东方学会会刊》《唐研究》《早期中古中国》等学术期刊。目前正在筹备出版第一本专著，系统探讨唐代文人如何通过文学作品建构自我形象及其背后的政治考量。
缪晓静于2021年9月至10月在复旦大学中华文明国际研究中心从事访问研究。
内容简介
This special issue features ten essays on autobiographical writing in premodern Asia. Bringing together scholars working across a wide range of literary, religious, and historical traditions, these essays reconsider how lives were narrated, authorized, and remembered before the emergence of modern autobiographical conventions. Drawing on sources in Chinese, Japanese, Pali, Hindi, and Arabic, the essays examine forms of self-representation as diverse as Confucian dialogues, Daoist hagiographies, Buddhist naming practices, Jain spiritual narratives, Arabic scholarly autobiography, vernacular memoirs, literary fiction, strange tales, autobiographical poetry, and self-authored epitaphs. Together, they explore recurring questions concerning authorship, authority, religious identity, gender, literary mediation, illness, and mortality. They also examine the relationship between individual experience and the social, institutional, and textual frameworks through which lives were narrated. Rather than seeking a single model of autobiography in premodern Asia, this special issue demonstrates the region’s remarkable diversity of life-writing traditions and advances a broader comparative understanding of autobiography as a historically contingent and culturally embedded mode of self-representation.
目录
Introduction Writing the Self: Autobiographical Traditions in Premodern Asia Xiaojing Miao (The University of Hong Kong) & Matthew Wells (University of Kentucky) Essay 1. Confucius’s Autobiographical Persona in the Analects Matthias L. Richter (University of Colorado at Boulder) 2. “I Witnessed My Teacher Attain Transcendence”:Auto/Biographical Conventions in Supreme Purity Daoist Hagiography Matthew Wells (University of Kentucky) 3. Envy and the Recounting of Misery in Arabic Autobiography Devin J. Stewart (Emory University) 4. Names as Auto | Biographies: Female Ordination, Vedic Eti(m)ology, and the Genesis of Mahāyāna Prophecy Chong Fu（University of Oxford） 5. Auto-Allegory:The Ardhakathānaka of Banārasīdās Rahul Bjørn Parson (UC Berkeley) 6. Constructing Identities, Borrowing Narratives:Ancient and Medieval Japanese Women’s Memoirs and The Tale of Genji Christina Laffin (University of British Columbia) 7. The Overdetermined “I”:Autobiographical Form and the Coherence of Character in The Life of an Amorous Woman David C. Atherton (Harvard University) 8. In the Fox’s Own Words:Animal Spirits and Other Nonhuman Beings Speaking About Themselves in Chinese Records of the Strange Antje Richter（University of Colorado at Boulder） 9. Individuality Through Tradition:The Master of Deep-Seated Anguish and “Relieving Illness” Xiaojing Miao (The University of Hong Kong) 10. Remembering the Self in Late Medieval Chinese Entombed Epitaphs Alexei Kamran Ditter (Reed College)
