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critiques and make them meaningful. By breaking down the barriers between literary criticism and political thought, I seek to engage a broad audience and to contribute to a multidisciplinary conversation in four major areas.
First, I hope to bring to life the philosophical dimension of Du Fu’s poetry, which is not well understood and remains underappreciated. The image of Du is too heavily invested in a traditional view of his character and his emotions. His ideas have gone largely unstudied. This leads to a distorted view of even the purely literary features of his poetry. For those features are only partially intelligible without reference to their underlying political ideas. The book is therefore aimed at audiences interested not just in Du Fu studies but in the broader fields of Chinese literature, philosophy, and intellectual history. Indeed, the group of poems I read in this study contains some of the earliest coherent political thinking to emerge from the intellectual trends that brought about the mid-Tang mainstream and late-Tang ancient prose reform movements. Du Fu’s poetry became an influential source in these literary and political trends in the Tang and also became central to similar debates that took place in the succeeding Song dynasty. A deeper understanding of Du’s political thinking is thus essential.
Second, I seek to contribute to a relatively new interdisciplinary field—new even in the Western humanities and social sciences—which stakes out its ground in the nexus between political philosophy and literature, by opening the field of Chinese literature to new interpretive methods that adopt ideas and insights from the modern disciplines of political thought and philosophy. This, in my view, is essential both to Chinese studies and to philosophy and intellectual history. The latter make only dubious claims to universality of knowledge if their field of investigation is limited to the West. And the former, in order to build upon gains made in philology, textual criticism, and literary history, must begin to frame new questions even while seeking to answer those questions with new methodological approaches.