The poetry of the Late Tang often looked backward, and many poets of the period distinguished themselves through the intensity of their retrospective gaze. Chinese poets had always looked backward to some degree, but for many Late Tang poets the echoes and the traces of the past had a singular aura. In this work, Stephen Owen resumes telling the literary history of the Tang that he began in his works on the Early and High Tang. Focusing in particular on Du Mu, Li Shangyin, and Wen Tingyun, he analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. The Late Tang, Owen argues, forces us to change our very notion of the history of poetry. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of available choices - styles, genres, the voices of past poets. It was this repertoire that would endure.

宇文所安，又名斯蒂芬·歐文。1946年生於美國密蘇裏州聖路易斯市，長於美國南方小城。1959年移居巴爾的摩。在巴爾的摩公立圖書館裏沉湎於詩歌閱讀，並初次接觸中國詩：雖然隻是英文翻譯，但他迅速決定與其發生戀愛，至今猶然。1972年獲耶魯大學東亞係博士學位，隨即執教耶魯大學。二十年後應聘哈佛，任教東亞係、比較文學係，現為詹姆斯·布萊恩特·柯南德特級教授。有著作數種（其中《初唐詩》、《盛唐詩》、《追憶》、《中國古典文學思想》被譯為中文），論文多篇。其人也，性樂煙酒，心好歌詩。簡脫不持儀形，喜俳諧。自言其父嘗憂其業，中國詩無以謀生，而後竟得自立，實屬僥幸耳。