"The poets of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126) were writing after what was then and still is acknowledged to be the Golden Age of Chinese poetry, the Tang dynasty (618-907). Many Northern Song poets were haunted by a deep sense of self-consciousness, an awareness of the challenge to emerge from the shadows of the greatest poets of the tradition even as they claimed an affinity with their predecessors. This study examines how these Song poets responded to their uncomfortable proximity to such impressive predecessors and reveals how their response shaped their literary art." "The author's focus is on the poetic theory and practice of the poet Huang Tingjian (1045-1105). Huang regarded the past as an inescapable presence, and in response, he engendered a poetics that recognized and incorporated the textual histories of words in order to create new meanings, meanings with his imprimatur. Critics chide Huang for expounding a theory that they see as a platform for plagiarism, an excuse for acts of mere poetic appropriation. The author shows how this criticism ignores the historical forces that occasioned Huang's poetics and consequently misses the reasons why in many respects Huang is an exemplary Northern Song poet.". "This first full-length study in English of one of the most difficult and complex poets of the classical Chinese tradition aims to provide the background for understanding better why Huang was so greatly admired, especially by the outstanding literati of his age, and why later scholars claim Huang is the characteristic Northern Song poet. The author relates Huang's poetics to both the larger context of traditional Chinese poetry and specific changes in late Northern Song cultural history. He demonstrates that in Huang's heavily allusive and intellectually complex re-reading and rewriting of the past, we have a crucially important set of observations on the nature of literature and culture and the relation of the past to the present, as well as a daring transformation of the literary canon." "This study is bracketed by a consideration of how Huang's poetics can be related to Western literary concerns. This is not done to fit Chinese literature into the frame of Western literary discourse, but to use the analysis of Huang to scrutinize that frame in a comparative critique that engages issues with which he was deeply concerned, notably the idea of the Author, imitation, technique, and spontaneity of composition. The author concludes by considering how Huang's literary project resembles, but ultimately differs from, Western literary theories of influence and intertextuality."--BOOK JACKET.