Elegies for Empire: A Poetics of Memory in the Late Work of Du Fu

Facing a transformed socio-political landscape after the An Lushan Rebellion (756–763), Tang dynasty elites questioned inherited understandings of tradition and anxiously reflected on their relations to both recent and ancient pasts. Du Fu (712–770), widely considered China’s greatest poet, presciently addressed these concerns in his late work on memory and the means by which the past survives.

In Elegies for Empire, Gregory Patterson maps out a poetics of memory in Du Fu’s poems from his pr...