Research Fields: Professor Owen’s primary areas of research interest are premodern Chinese literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his previous work has focused on the middle period of Chinese Literature (200-1200); however, he is currently engaged in writing a collection of essays on Chinese literature of the early period. He has a concurrent interest in Chinese drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Selected Works: An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton 1996), The End of the Chinese “Middle Ages” (Stanford, 1996), Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), Mi-lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire (Harvard, 1989), Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature(Harvard, 1986), and Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics (Wisconsin, 1985). Three earlier books on Chinese poetry were published by Yale.
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
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