Research On American Sinologist Stephen Owen’s Attainments In The Poetry Of Han And Wei Dynasties

The study of classical poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties has always been much accounted in the domestic academic circles. There are considerable research achievement about this. Foreign scholars also attaches great importance to this area. For example, Stephen Owen, an American Sinologist, also paied attention on the research of Han and Wei Dynasties and wrote the book, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry. And this paper is a narration and comment of the book.First of all, one important respect of Stephen Owen’s researching about the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties is his research on the subjects of the poetry. He researched the subject of the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties, mainly about immortals, banquet and death and shows a series of research theories. He created the theories of "variant" and "fragment". Meanwhile, Stephen Owen developed a thorough research by researching the authorship and the narrator’s tone about the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties. Second, another innovation is his research about the "generating" of the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties. Stephen Owen focused much on the the spread and change process of the Han and Wei Dynasties. His unscramble about the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties is not only explored from the texts, but also contains the historical fact or and explored the history of literary reception. That is going back to the past when the poetry generated,stressing the steady historical facts that made the poetry come into being and discussing how did the poetry’s text created its context. We can find that Stephen Owen’s view of the history of Chinese classical literature is a kind of integral conception through the scientific analysis of the research of the poetry of Han and Wei Dynasties. He treated the early poetry as a kind of poetry which is an unity. The poetry system has its repeated themes, quiet stable paragraphs and syntactical structures and its special description steps. He thought that the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties has a specific poetry corpus in its form’s generating process and put forward the theory of "Formula", "fragment", "variant" about the generating of the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties. Meanwhile, Stephen Owen point out the development of the early poetry’s themes, such as "Being awake at night", the topic of the bird and the " fragment of Separation" and so on.The method that Stephen Owen went back to the circumstances when the literature generated and listened to them in their own era background gives us reference for researching the poetry of the Han and Wei Dynasties. But there are also defects and shortages in his research and we have made essential judgment.