追憶：中國古典文學中的往事再現

by Stephen Owen, 宇文所安

追憶：中國古典文學中的往事再現

Genres: China

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1986

About the author

Stephen Owen (1946–2026) was an American sinologist who specialized in Chinese literature, particularly Tang-dynasty poetry and comparative poetics.

Much of his work was focused on the middle period of Chinese literature (200-1200), however, he has also written on literature of the early period and the Qing. Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry, including An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton, 1996); The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry (Harvard Asia Center, 2006); and The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860) (Harvard Asia Center, 2006). Owen has completed the translation of the complete poetry of Du Fu, which was published as the inaugural volumes of the Library of Chinese Humanities series, featuring Chinese literature in translation. Owen earned a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1972) in Chinese Language from Yale University. He taught there from 1972 to 1982, before coming to Harvard. In acknowledgment of his groundbreaking work that crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, Owen was awarded the James Bryant Conant University Professorship in 1997.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautifully written, intensely and subtly imagined work is one of the finest books of criticism I've ever read. It's perhaps unfortunate that it should -necessarily, I guess- be marketed as a book about classical Chinese poetry. It is that, of course, brilliantly so, but it's also a persuasive and moving meditation on how literature grapples with and uses memory and death and the past. A work of real profundity that changed the way I read poetry.