Introduction: The Emergence of the City into Writing

During the eleventh century, literati of the Song Empire changed the geographic orientation of literary genres to make a place for the city in writing. An approach to urban history through literary geography preserves historical connections between writing and walking and between text and the city, thereby resisting the tautologies of social science and the homologies of modernity. Based on an analysis of 155 collected works (wenji) from ca. 800 CE to ca. 1100 CE, Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis contributes to a non-linear comparative history of cities. The introduction illustrates this method by demonstrating that the “ward system” of the Tang Empire and its collapse during the Song dynasty, alleged by Katō Shigeshi, are figments of social-science theory.