Event
Prof. Xiaofei Tian (Harvard) Writing Empire and Self: The Making of a Book
When
· 2:30 PM MDT
Shown in the venue’s time zone (America/Denver), not yours.
Where
Boulder, CO
Tickets
No on-sale date recorded
This event came from a public calendar feed. Calendar feeds publish when a show happens, not when its tickets go on sale — so this is genuinely unknown rather than zero, and rather than “already on sale”.
What the source said
In this talk I will introduce my new book, Writing Empire and Self: Poetic and Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China, recently published by Columbia University Press. China’s early medieval period, from the fifth through the early seventh century, from the Northern and Southern Dynasties through the unified Sui, was a time of political fragmentation, military strife, and ethnic conflict. It also witnessed brilliant artistic creations as well as a full flowering of court culture, with poetry at its heart. How did poetry come to be regarded as the most potent form of cultural capital, a privileged literary genre, and a foundational skill for members of the elite? How was poetry transformed from an instrument of empire building to a venue for articulating personal trauma and voicing critique of the state? These are the questions addressed in the book, and in this talk I will discuss why I decided on working with this period, how these questions were developed, and what new possibilities exist for future research.