The Nature of Water: Complexity in the Fu

The Nature of Water: Complexity in the Fu

David Andrew Knight

Monday, April 16, 2018 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Room 202, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

Fu poetry underwent a transformation during the 8th and 9th centuries, partly due to its inclusion in the imperial examinations, but also owing to the merging of the varied stylistic streams flowing out of the the Han and Six Dynasties forms. Scholars have traditionally considered the division between the “old-style” 古 and prosodically “regulated” 律 fu to be a line of demarcation. A tension arises when one is asked to consider the startling diversity of poems placed under the title of fu. Dr. Knight proposes that the fu from medieval times onward are in fact a complex poetic model of indigenous problem-solving.


David Knight is an independent scholar. He received his Ph.D. in Chinese literature from Yale University in 2014. He has taught at Marlboro College, McGill University, and the University of Chicago. His current research projects include a literary history of the 9th century statesman and poet Li Deyu, and a study of the fu from medieval to late imperial times as an indigenous form of problem-solving.

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