56th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture: "Returning to the High Tang"

The “High Tang” is seen as the apex of classical Chinese poetry. But to understand an era, we need to free it from the aging weight of its reputation. Professor Stephen Owen shows that the received understanding of the High Tang (indeed the very term) was entirely the creation of the early thirteenth century, half a millennium after the fact. He goes back and looks at the community that defines the “High Tang,” producing a system of values and a version of empire different from and in opposition to the imperial center and the oligarchy of families that controlled it. He argues that this was not only the beginning of the “literati” as a distinct community, but that poetry was constitutive of that community.
Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University