On February 5, University of Washington professor of literature Ping Wang, will give a book talk on her first monograph The Poetic Way of Xie Lingyun : Literary Expression and the Natural World (University Press 2025).
Professor Wang will be joined by Wendy Swartz, Chair and Professor of Chinese literature at Rutgers University for this talk.
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), Wang 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.
Ping Wang is professor of Asian languages at the University of Washington. She is author of The Age of Courtly Writing: Wen xuan Compiler Xiao Tong (501-531) and His Circle.
Thursday, February 5, 2026
3:30 – 5PM
Thomson Hall 317
Wendy Swartz is the author of Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China (Harvard, 2018; translated into Chinese as《詩賦與哲學：六朝文學中意義建構的互文性模式》(Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2024)) and Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427-1900) (Harvard, 2008; translated into Chinese as《閱讀陶淵明》(Taipei: Linking Press, 2014; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2016)). She is the principal editor of Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (Columbia, 2014; named as one of Library Journal’s Best Reference Title of 2015) and a co-editor of Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community (Brill, 2018). She is the translator of The Poetry of Xi Kang (ca. 223-ca. 262), in The Poetry of Ruan Ji and Xi Kang, translated by Stephen Owen and Wendy Swartz (De Gruyter, 2017). She has also published numerous articles and essays on early medieval literature.