The fashioning of a poetic genius: Yuan Zhen and Mid-Tang imperial culture

Yuan Zhen (779--831) is in many respects the most misunderstood of the major Tang poets, both in terms of his original work in Chinese and as he is read in English translation. This dissertation studies his poetic innovations and the central role he played in Mid-Tang imperial culture. In particular, this work focuses on Yuan's pailu poetry, which circulated in Mid-Tang literary and political circles as some of the most valued works of the time, yet was neglected in later ages. This project involves a broad range of topics across Tang literature, history, and culture.;By situating Yuan Zhen's pailu poems at the center of his literary canon, Chapter One will illuminate the development of this genre and identify Yuan Zhen as a master of the form second only to Du Fu. It also seeks to restore the poet to the central position he deserves in the Mid-Tang cultural world.;Chapter Two examines Yuan Zhen's autobiographical pailu poems, which meditate on the evolution of his self-identity as a poet politician. As the poems discussed here are for the most part Yuan Zhen's early works, this chapter also charts the early development of the poet.;Chapter Three examines Yuan Zhen and his fellow poet Bai Juyi's mutual fashioning in both their exchange poems and cultural performances. Chapter Four presents a new approach to interpreting Yuan Zhen's chuanqi masterpiece "The Story of Yingying," combining a study of the pailu form and chuanqi. Chapter Five studies Yuan Zhen's elegies and his contribution to the elegiac mode in Chinese literature. It focuses on his self-fashioning by way of an exploitation of the Mid-Tang mourning culture.;A new investigation of one of the Tang masters, my study of Yuan Zhen will help clear the muddied critical waters of Mid-Tang literary studies and produce a reconfiguration of our understanding of the Mid-Tang literary world as a whole.