What happens to their words after a writer has been purged? How does the literature of one campaign lay the foundation for the politics of the next? This chapter follows the fate of images rendered heterodox by those such as Fei Xiaotong and Liu Shahe in the period following the labeling of these writers as “rightist” and their ousting from the national literary community. It applies Abby Warburg’s conception of “social memory,” in which the re-adoption of symbols in visual art reflects a process of storing and releasing “mnemic energy,” to the circulation of texts following the shift to the Anti-Rightist campaign. It argues that the continued circulation of literary imagery reflects not only a literature capable of resurrecting memoires, as Reinhart Koselleck suggested, but an inner-literary memory. It also shows that as writers rejected the imagery of Fei’s “spring chill” and Liu’s “Pieces of Plants,” they created a literary bridge between the bucolic splendor of the Hundred Flowers and the supernature of the Great Leap Forward.

This chapter explores the mediation of experience in Middle Republican Rome. Mediation ‘facilitates the externalization of memories we produce in our minds … [and] through the internalization of mediated memories … we participate in collective memory’.1 In what follows, I will suggest that the First Punic War was the first event in Roman history to be mediated in certain ways that held the real potential to transmute lived experience and personal recollection, supplementing them, or even replacing them, with a different set of narratives that emerged from innovations in Roman artistic production. In Rome in the late third and early second centuries BC, especially in the years after Rome’s first war with Carthage, we encounter the first time that memories of conflict were tied to Latin poetry and public narrative art. Accordingly, this chapter will track the impact that these new memorial media made on Rome’s cultures of memory.2