The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture

by Stephen Owen

This book explores, through a series of essays, a set of interrelated elements that define the literary culture of China in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. This period, known as the Mid-Tang, broke with many of the intellectual habits of the “middle period” of Chinese culture and adumbrated many of the characteristics of China in the Song and later periods. The first essay examines “singularity,” representations of identity as an assertion of superiority over others and as an alienation that brings rejection by others. The second essay addresses different ways of representing landscapes, showing the ways in which the underlying order of nature had become a problem in the Mid-Tang. The third essay discusses the tendency to offer hypothetical explanations for phenomena that either run contrary to received wisdom or try to account for situations usually thought not to require explanation. When carried out at the level of pure play, such subjective acts of interpretation are wit, and the fourth essay analyzes playfully inflated interpretations of domestic spaces and leisure activities as a discourse of private valuation, articulated against commonsense values.

Genres: Nonfiction, China

212 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Stephen Owen is a sinologist specializing in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his work has 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. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2006) among many other awards and honors.

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The End of the Chinese Middle Ages: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture by Stephen Owen this weekend. I didn't realize that it was going to be more literary review than history but I really enjoyed it nonetheless. He looked at the years 791-825, and the different literary trends that were going on. There seemed to be some interesting themes that he raised, the issue of individualism in poetry, writing to upset people, taking the idea of a good poet never being appreciated in his time to a whole new level. He did a lot of poetry analysis, and thankfully, always included the Chinese versions of the poems. He definitely managed to give a good flavour for what, he admitted, some of the people were thinking about at the time. It was interesting as the later Tang from what I have read so far was a time of increasing commerce and the acceptance of merchants into society. In the poetry shown there was a much greater idea of ownership and need to possess than was shown in earlier works, particularly over nature.

He also did an analysis of two short stories that were popular at the time. Giving a full English translation of the stories in the appendices. The analysis of the stories were my favorite part of the book. I'd heard both stories before but never thought of them in the terms he described before which were very interesting. Both were romantic tales that ended poorly. The first was about a man who choose a beautiful woman companion and then abandoned her despite promises of eternal love, and then after agreeing to spend 8 years with her. She cursed him at her death, and he ended up turning into a hateful jealous man who killed many of his future wives and lovers as he suspected them of being untrue. The other story as Owen stated "unique" in Tang stories has such a strong reverberation to it that most people think it must be true. It's the story of a man who is teased by his friends for not participating in their orgies. So he goes and has a love affair with a distant maternal cousin, someone he could have married, however he doesn't marry her, they are separated, he ends up marrying someone else as does she. It's a simple outline and yet the story is far more complex. Both think they are in the right. Both try to get the audience, and the public, to be sympathetic to their cause. Both act like real people, being fickle, changing their minds, and at the same time being very sincere and passionate. It's easy to see why it has survived for so long.

A very nice little book. Different to what I was expecting. But literature studies are definitely a large part of understanding Chinese history so I'm very glad I read it. The more background the better!