The Reception of Du Fu (712–770) and His Poetry in Imperial China by Ji Hao (review)

Abstract

The burgeoning scholarship on the reception history of major Chinese poets is a welcome and overdue development in the study of premodern Chinese literature. Ji Hao’s The Reception of Du Fu is the first in a series of monographs we can anticipate in English on the reception history of the greatest Chinese poet. Although Hao’s title suggests a general survey of the field of Du Fu studies, the book perhaps would have been better called Studies in the Reception of Du Fu, since the field is vast and Hao focuses on a particular set of themes and texts spanning a period from the Northern Song through Qianlong’s reign (1735– 1799) during the Qing dynasty. Although I believe Hao’s book is a useful addition to the literature, there are some critical methodological and conceptual problems that I find with his approach. In the introduction, Hao raises an initial series of questions that very broadly define the goals for the study of reception history: