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Third, I hope this book will contribute to an important subfield of politics, utopian studies. The field of literary and political utopias in Western literature and thought is well developed and highly advanced, but there are only a handful of similar studies concerning the expression of this nearly universal theme in Chinese civilization. Du’s poems, as I argue in the concluding chapter of the book, represent a significant example of how these themes are figured and conceived in Chinese culture.
Finally, I seek to contribute as well to the field of religious studies. The study of prophetic literature in the West, as in the case of utopian studies, is a well-developed field with a long history. But only two studies have posed and examined the possibility of a similar tradition in China. And no study has attempted to explore in detail how a prophetic voice might be present in Chinese poetry and how it might work in literary-critical and philosophical terms.