From Court Culture to River-and-Lake Culture: Jiang Kui's Literary and Artistic Creation and the "Third Way"

Abstract

This study focuses on the central question: "How did Jiang Kui forge a third path between elegant culture and river-and-lake culture?" Methodologically, the article combines close textual reading, cultural reconstruction, and cross-genre analysis, incorporating Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" and Geertz's "thick description" to ensure analytical verifiability and historical contextual integrity. Findings reveal that Jiang Kui achieved a unified "elegant culture" system by crafting a high-toned aesthetics of "purity, simplicity, and quietude" through tonal restraint, transitional organization, and cool imagery clusters in lyrics and poetry. In his river-and-lake-inspired writings, he elevated individual wandering to shared spiritual capital via imagery chains like "temporary residence, solitary boat, cold plum blossoms, and clear night," establishing a paradigm of "poverty yet integrity, refusing to kowtow to contemporary fashions." Musically, he proposed the principle of "harmony" in On the Great Music, and through tonal juxtaposition, rhythmic pauses, and the blending of refined and popular styles in self-composed tunes like Nine Songs of Yue and Pity for the Red Robe, he constructed a "harmonious ideal" supported by both value and technical dimensions, ultimately pioneering a "third path" centered on art and ritual. The study's implications are threefold: first, Jiang Kui's cross-genre creativity deepens our understanding of Southern Song cultural tensions and literati identity formation; second, it provides a framework for future research—via digital corpora and quantitative methods to further reveal the coupling mechanisms of poetry-lyrics-music, and through comparative studies with contemporary and later literati to test the collective nature and historical continuity of the "third path"; third, it prompts reflection on how knowledge communities can maintain independent agency amid contradictions and respond to society from a contemporary perspective.