DEFINING THE SOVEREIGN BODY

Jack W. Chen’s Poetics of Sovereignty is an ambitious study of Tang Taizong’s corpus of texts and its roles in the political and cultural transformations of the Zhenguan era. Chen is ambitious on three levels. First, he makes strong claims for the role Taizong’s writings played in shaping his rule. Secondly, Chen examines texts that have been explored by major scholars of Tang history and literature writing in English and offers new interpretations within a distinctive analytic framework. Finally, he seeks to broaden this framework to include hermeneutic perspectives that make it accessible to scholars of European traditions. While Chen does not fully succeed in all aspects of this ambitious program, his accomplishments remain significant and are an important contribution to our thinking about the role of literary practice in middle-period Chinese culture and society.