This book invites readers on a critical journey across the evolving aesthetics and ideology of Chinese literary culture from the first century BCE to the third century CE. Central to our inquiry is a model of becoming—from a self-oriented intellectual labor toward an individually embodied state of “erudition” and its cross-media manifestations. The emergence and proliferation of this model fostered what the book encapsulates as an “enchantment of erudition,” a phenomenal re-orientation of literary culture toward a multi-centered realization of intellectual labor and individual embodiments—an alternative to the institutional regulation of knowledge production in early imperial China.