Christian de Pee (University of Michigan)

During the eleventh century, literati tried for the first time to capture the living urban landscape in writing. As a new literary subject, the urban streetscape afforded scope for original effects, but literati also wrote the city for ideological reasons. On the written page, they could set themselves apart—as individuals in the anonymous crowd, as connoisseurs among spendthrift nobles—as they could not in the streets and markets of the dense metropolis, and they could conform the confusing movement of people, goods, and money to a moral economy of perfect circulation and equitable distribution, as they could not in practical administration.