Recarving the Dragon: Understanding Chinese Poetics.

• Author: Richter, Antje
• Position: Book review

Edited by Olga Lomova. Studia Orientalia pragensia, vol. 23. Prague: Charles University, Karolinum press, 2003. Pp. viii + 387.

It has been seven years since the conference volume Recarving the Dragon: Understanding Chinese Poetics was published, but so far this excellent book, edited by Olga Lomova, has not yet received the full measure of attention it deserves. This is astonishing, considering the high quality of the articles as well as the fact that the study of Chinese poetics is still underrepresented in Western scholarship, especially compared with the abundance of Chinese and Japanese publications on the subject. The East Asian indigenous focus on Chinese poetics may be one of the reasons why this volume is bilingual, with four Chinese contributions among the others in English.

Recarving the Dragon collects fifteen essays originally prepared for a conference held at Charles University in Prague in September 2001 (the conference program is included in an appendix). While the allusion to Wenxin diaolong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the title is certainly an acknowledgment of the momentousness of this critical work within the Chinese tradition, the great diversity of contents this volumes offers goes far beyond the scope of Liu Xie's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] work. It covers broad ground, indeed, not just historically, spanning more than two millennia of Chinese literary history, but also with regard to subject matter, methodology, and individual scholarly approaches. It is exactly this diversity that makes the book so appealing, because it opens up a wide perspective on Chinese poetics and gives us an opportunity to fully appreciate its depth and heterogeneity as well as its distinctiveness and coherence. Although some of the authors have in the meantime published elsewhere on topics similar to those represented in this volume, these contributions are still original and unique pieces of scholarship, so that Recarving the Dragon continues to be of enormous value and inspiration for the study of Chinese literary thought.

The first three articles in the chronologically arranged book are dedicated to three major topics within early Chinese poetics. Haun Saussy takes an comparative approach in his perspicacious investigation of the relationship between musical and literary thought. Martin Kern's contribution, mainly based on the study of recently excavated manuscripts, offers groundbreaking insights into the process of the...