Early Tang Poetry. By Stephen Owen

Author: Stephen Owen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: Preface to the English Edition of Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry
The English editions of Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry were published about a quarter of a century ago. At that time, the academic field of classical Chinese literature in China was very different from what it is today. We had the basic raw materials, although Wang Ji’s five-volume collected poems were not published until 1987, ten years after the publication of Early Tang Poetry; at that time, many annotated collections of poems had not yet been published, and we also had not yet benefited from the important research by scholars like Fu Xuancong on the lives of authors and the chronological arrangement of their poems. Today, electronic literature makes it very easy to search for words, bringing great convenience to research work, but twenty-five years ago, all of this was unimaginable. At that time, we lacked the research tools we have today and had to rely on the academic achievements of the Qing and Republican periods. Most importantly, in the past twenty-five years, Chinese academia has made significant progress, and the field of Tang studies has become vibrant and inspiring. Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry have their limitations, errors, and shortcomings. If they could be rewritten, they would certainly be very different. Whether personally or in terms of the academic research I have utilized and referenced, there have been great changes. However, even after many years, I believe that some of the fundamental arguments in the books and the perspective they take on literary history still hold some validity.
Literary history is not the history of the famous. Literary history must include the famous, but its most important role lies in understanding literary practices in flux, using contemporary literary practices as the context for understanding the famous. We should not make sweeping generalizations about a century-long period but should examine shorter periods, groups of writers, and different regions. In this way, traditional academic research, such as studies of literary associations and chronological biographies, can be combined with literary history writing and theoretical research, thereby gaining new significance.
Literary history attempts to connect specific details with an understanding of the whole, but the complexity of the whole often makes simple generalizations inadequate. In the study of poetry, the sole purpose of academic work is to help us better understand specific poems. A good literary history always returns to the poems themselves, allowing us to clearly see the astonishing, beautiful, and bold creations of the poets.
Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Jia Jinhua for translating these two books: if Tsinghua University Press believes that these works are still worth republishing in China over twenty years later, then half of the credit belongs to Professor Jia.
August 2004