Bookshelf
| can't find it |

| browse books |
books
 

| book details |

The Poetic Way of Xie Lingyun: Literary Expression and the Natural World

By (author) Ping Wang

| on special |

normal price: R 1,116.95

Price: R 1,004.95


| book description |

The father of Chinese landscape poetry in time and place During the dark centuries between the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE and the golden age of reunified China under the Tang and Song dynasties (618–1279), the shi poetic form embraced new themes and structure. In this meticulously constructed study, Ping Wang traces the social conditions that sparked innovation and marked a significant turn in intellectual history. Using biography, social history, and literary analysis, she demonstrates how the shi form came to dominate classical Chinese poetry, making possible the works of the great poets of later dynasties and influencing literary development in Korea and Japan. Focusing on the life of poet Xie Lingyun (385–433), she traces the exile of aristocratic families in the wild south, which led to their thematic use of ""mountains and water"" (shanshui) landscapes over the pastoral ones of earlier writers and artists. Changes in poetic form moved away from genres associated with aggrandizement of the imperial court and, through innovative use of meter and syntax, created a new style of varied, fluid cadence. In Xie's redesigned five-syllable-line poetry, couplets balanced contradictions that the poet used to capture principles of the natural world. Wang shows how this literary form enabled exiled scholars to make meaning of their tentative existence in the southland, in which the mountains and water imaged the yin-yang principle underlying existence. The post-Han intelligentsia thus used the dilemma of southern exile to craft literature that was revolutionary in both content and form.

| product details |



Normally shipped | Forthcoming
Publisher | University of Washington Press
Published date | 16 Sep 2025
Language |
Format | Paperback / softback
Pages | 277
Dimensions | 229 x 152 x 0mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 0g
ISBN | 978-0-2957-5373-7
Readership Age |
BISAC | literary criticism / poetry
Expected |

| other options |


| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future

Mustafa Suleyman
Paperback / softback
352 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order


The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes

William Kelleher Storey
Paperback / softback
528 pages
was: R 425.95
now: R 382.95
Usually dispatched in 6-12 days

This first comprehensive biography of Cecil Rhodes in a generation illuminates Rhodes’s vision for the expansion of imperialism in southern Africa, connecting politics and industry to internal development, and examines how this fueled a lasting, white-dominated colonial society.

The Memory Collectors: A Novel

Dete Meserve
Paperback / softback
320 pages


Enquiries only


Survive the AI Apocalypse: A guide for solutionists

Bronwen Williams
Paperback / softback
232 pages
was: R 340.95
now: R 306.95
Forthcoming

Let's stare the future down and, instead of fearing AI, become solutionists.