Banished Immortal: The Collaborative Construction of Li Bai’s Image
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Abstract
This study investigates the collaborative construction of Li Bai’s “Banished Immortal” image across historical periods and media. Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of self-fashioning and Stuart Hall’s theory of cultural representation, it integrates content, thematic, discourse, and computational analyses to examine how this literary persona emerged, circulated, and acquired cultural significance. A custom Python program identified occurrences of “Banished Immortal” and related expressions in the Complete Works of Li Taibai, and the results were manually verified. The computational findings reveal an imbalance between self-fashioning and representation by others. Among nearly one thousand poems attributed to Li Bai, the designation occurs only twice in his own writings, compared with twenty occurrences in poems by other writers. This distribution suggests that external representation played a greater role in consolidating his literary image. Qualitative analysis indicates that Li Bai strategically appropriated the designation to negotiate political circumstances and personal experiences. His contemporaries and later writers, however, emphasized his transcendence and poetic genius while marginalizing his political ambitions and worldly struggles. Their representations transformed a complex historical individual into a relatively stable cultural icon. To examine the continuation of this process in contemporary media, the study analyzes the 2023 animated film Chang’an. The film illustrates how the “Banished Immortal” image is recoded through visual storytelling while retaining its symbolic associations. By connecting literary theory with qualitative interpretation and computational evidence, this study develops a systematic framework for understanding the collaborative production of literary personae and offers a transferable model for examining their cultural endurance.
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