Essays in Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History

This is one of a pair of volumes by Paul Kroll. Collecting eleven essays by this leading scholar of Chinese poetry, the volume presents a selection of studies devoted to the medieval period, centering especially on the T'ang dynasty. It opens with the author's famous articles on the dancing horses of T'ang, on the emperor Hsÿan Tsung, and on poems relating to the holy mountain T'ai Shan. Following these are detailed examinations of landscape and mountain imagery in the poetry of the "High T'ang" period in the mid-8th century, while the second section of the book includes two articles on birds in medieval poetry, and four of Kroll's influential studies focusing on the verse-form known as the fu or "rhapsody".