Evan V. Nicoll-Johnson

This project examines literary representations of landscapes and ecosystems from early medieval China—third to seventh centuries CE—, focusing on narrative accounts of fantastic and unusual events —zhiguai 志怪 or anomaly accounts— and their relationship with other contemporaneous genres. The research considers representations of the natural world and its inhabitants across a variety of poetic and prose genres, including depictions of humans, animals, and supernatural creatures dwelling and interacting in mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, deserts, and cities. The project demonstrates that anomaly accounts were an important component of a multi-genre spectrum of literary writing that provided both inspiration to other writers as well as knowledge about the world and its inhabitants.