Chinese Literature in Transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

• Author: KROLL, PAUL W.
• Position: Review

Chinese Literature in Transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. By DONALD HOLZMAN. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Brookfield, Vt.: ASHOATE PUBLISHING COMPANY, 1998. $98.95.

Immortals, Festivals, and Poetry in Medieval China: Studies in Social and Intellectual History. By DONALD HOLZMAN. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Brookfield, Vt.: ASHGATE PUBLISHING COMPANY, 1998. $106.95.

For over forty years Donald Holzman has been a leading figure in the study of early medieval Chinese literature. His well-known and oft-quoted books, La Vie et Ia pensee de Hi Kang (Brill, 1957) and Poetry and Politics: The Life and Works of Juan Chi (210-2 63) (Cambridge, 1976), are landmark studies on two of the most important third-century poets. In more than fifty articles he has advanced and enlarged our understanding of Chinese culture in the first half of the first millennium A.D. Everything from court poetry, folk ballads, longevity practices, literary criticism, aristocratic life, popular festivals, philosophical debate, and fashions in eremetism, to name but a few topics, has come under his scrutiny and been illuminated for us-sometimes in French, sometimes in English-by his unique blend of philology, wit, and humanism. A selection of his articles has now been brought together in two volumes from Ashgate's "Variorum" series, which will greatly ease the library labors of students and scholars wishin g to consult this or that article in journal, conference volume, or Festschrift.

The first volume includes five articles ("The Conversational Tradition in Chinese Philosophy," "Confucius and Ancient Chinese Literary Criticism," "Les premiers vers pentasyllabiques dates dans la poesie chinoise," "On the Authenticity of the Tetrameter Poetry Attributed to Ruan Ji," and "Literary Criticism in China in the Early Third Century AD") dating from 1956 to 1989, plus the complete 1996 book entitled Landscape Appreciation in Ancient and Early...