Considering the End: Mortality in Early Medieval Chinese Poetic Representation

This book focuses on the representation of human mortality in early medieval Chinese literature. This theme is observed and reconstructed through the contextual and intertextual analysis of the work of eminent writers of the period, texts that have never been examined from an eschatological perspective. Through this perspective, and the careful use of research from the fields of religion and anthropology, the book offers a fresh view of commentator Wang Yi (fl. 89–158), well-known poets Ruan Ji (210–63), Tao Qian (365?–427), and Xie Lingyun (385–433), and also brings into the discussion relevant works by several previously neglected authors. The book contributes a new angle from which to appreciate literature of this and other periods in Chinese history.

Timothy Wai Keung Chan, Ph.D. (1999) in Chinese, University of Colorado, Boulder, is Associate Professor of Chinese at Hong Kong Baptist University. He publishes widely in Chinese and in English on early medieval Chinese literature, intellectual history, and early Daoism.

"It opens up new directions on how to look at the priod, and offers fresh insights into several of the best known poets, as well as some of those from this period who are far less well studied. Given that is is innovative in its approach and contains material that has been carefully gathered and analysed, it is a book that one will certainly return to, reading it on more than one occasion." – Olga Lomová, Charles University in Prague, in: Archiv Orientálni, 81:3 (2013)