The Poetics of Appropriation

The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian, 1045-1105 (Stanford University Press, 1993) addressed the notion of authorship and poetic language in Song dynasty China, taking as its focal point the work of Huang Tingjian, considered to be one of the most difficult poets in the classical Chinese tradition because of his dense use of recondite allusions. This study argued that the poetry of citation was completely in line with the Song project to reassess and classify all prior knowledge, and to invent a distinct cultural identity from those discourses. This book begins and ends with chapters that compare the seemingly contradictory elements of learning and spontaneity, and their relation to textuality, to similar discussions in western poetics.