Stephen Owen (sinologist)
Stephen Owen is an American sinologist specializing in Chinese literature, particularly Tang dynasty poetry and comparative poetics. He taught Chinese literature and comparative literature at Harvard University and is James Bryant Conant University Professor, Emeritus; becoming emeritus before he was one of only 25 Harvard University Professors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Life and career
Owen was born on October 30, 1946, in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese literature. He continued at Yale as a graduate student under the supervision of Hans Fränkel, receiving a Ph.D. in Chinese literature in 1972 with a dissertation entitled "The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yu : A Study of a Chinese Poetic Reform".After receiving his Ph.D., Owen taught at Yale until 1982, when he moved to Harvard. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other awards and honors. In 2015, he completed a six-volume annotated translation of the complete surviving poems of Du Fu, culminating an eight-year project. He was jointly awarded the 2018 Tang Prize in Sinology with Yoshinobu Shiba, "for his penetrating scholarship and theoretical ingenuity in Classical Chinese prose and poetry, especially Tang poetry and its translation."
Academic career
Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry. Harvard Magazine reported in 1998 that colleagues saw Owen as "a soaring and highly imaginative free spirit," comparing him to the eighth-century Chinese calligrapher Huaisu and to the foremost Tang dynasty poet, "the unfettered, convention-defying Li Bai..."Of The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü, James J. Y. Liu said that it "represents a remarkable achievement, especially for a first book..." A reviewer in China Review International wrote "reading Stephen Owen's The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry shocked me, the way a seismic shift in paradigms will."
Selected publications
The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. .The Poetry of the Early T'ang. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. .- * Revised Edition, Quirin Press 2012,.The Great Age of Chinese Poetry : The High T'ang. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981..
- * Revised Edition, Quirin Press 2013,.Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985..Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986. .Mi-Lou : Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 1989. .Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on East Asian Studies Distributed by Harvard University Press, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 1992..An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York: W.W. Norton, 1st, 1996..The End of the Chinese 'Middle Ages': Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. .The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center : Distributed by Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006..The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry. Cambridge, Massachusetts: published by the Harvard University Asia Center: Distributed by Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006. .
- Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, eds. The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2010.