Stepen Owen’s Way Of Writing The History Of Tang Dynasty Poetry

Stephen Owen is a U.S. scholar who can bring a fresh feeling for the studies ofdomestic Sinology，He is recognized as the third generation of scholars of Chineseliterature research，and is also a world-renowned Chinese literary translator。StephenOwen’s research field involves many aspects, such as literary history, literary theory,poetryhistory, poetry and theory，etc.. However, the most representative is his overallstudy of the history of the Tang Dynasty poetry (Early Tang Dynasty, Sheng TangDynasty, and Late Tang Dynasty). Although the completions for these three books areseparated in time by several decades, it is a coherent indivisible whole, and covers thehistory of nearly three hundred years of the Tang Dynasty poetry.In terms of many aspects including writing time, content, methods, etc., StephenOwen follows a "practice-theory-practice" road in the studies of History of TangPoetry. First is a new perspective to the construction of the early Tang Dynasty poetry,namely, budding stage；Then, he transfers to the theoretical summary stage due to thereflection about the disadvantages of traditional literary history, and give somesuggestions of rewriting the literary history from many aspects; Finally, he applys therevised theory of literary history to practice of late Tang Dynasty. However, thepractice stage of the Early Poetry is not blind. You can get a glimpse of the shadow ofmany of his later theories during this period. As Stephen Owen suggests, literaryhistory is not static. His writing course is also similar to this process. Thus his Tanghistory is always in constant reflection and reconstruction.In this paper, taking the foregoing three books as the object of study andcombining with its literary theoretical writings, we try to explore Stephen Owen’sunique concept and writing idea of Tang History. The paper is divided into thefollowing three parts:The first chapter deconstructs traditional literary history. This chapter is dividedinto two sections, namely, exploring the existing drawbacks of traditional literaryhistory and theoretical assumptions how to rewrite the literary history.The second chapter constructs the writing logic of Tang history. This chapter hasthree sections, namely, exploring the construction models of early Sheng Tang atStephen Owen’s early stages, analysing gains and losses in the aspect of construction,and investigating the reasons that Stephen Owen returns to the practice of Tanghistory. The third chapter rewrites the history of Tang’s practice. This chapter is dividedinto three sections. We elaborate how to concretely practice the theoretical assumptionof rewriting literary history mentioned in the first chapter.