Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I n writing this book i am indebted to many people for their inspiration and support. I would particularly like to thank Alan Berkowitz, Kang-i Sun Chang, Wilt Idema, and David Knechtges, who read through the entire manuscript and gave detailed, thoughtful comments, and whose warm friendship brings much joy to my work in this field. The book has been enriched by the questions and feedback from the audiences before whom I presented parts of the manuscript: the conference on the Six Dynasties organized by Jack Chen and held at Harvard University in May 2000, the China Humanities Seminar at Harvard Fairbank Center chaired by Michael Puett in October 2002, the hermeneutics conference organized by Kang-i Sun Chang and held at Yale University in May 2003, and a panel on Tao Yuanming organized by Wendy Swartz for the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting in March 2004. I have also benefited from my exchanges with Professor Yuan Xingpei of Beijing University over the years, whose fine work on Tao Yuanming remains a source of inspiration; from my conversations with Sarah Allen and Christopher Nugent, who both did extensive and outstanding research on textual transmission in the Tang literature in their ix x acknowledgments Ph.D. dissertations (Harvard University, 2004). I am thankful to my editors at University of Washington Press, Lorri Hagman, for her enthusiasm and encouragement when this book was still an unpolished manuscript, and Kerrie Maynes, for her careful copyediting; and to production manager John Stevenson , for patiently answering all my questions about the jacket illustration. But above all I wish to thank my parents and brother, whose faith in me and whose loving support are the foundation of everything important in my life. My greatest debt is to my beloved husband, Stephen Owen, for having made me fall in love with classical Chinese poetry all over again, for reading every chapter of this book in its every stage and offering stimulating criticism, and for understanding his wife’s long hours of intense work and cheerfully taking over many a domestic chore. I am eternally grateful for our finding each other—two people who share the same birthday, and who share the same passion for work, life, and poetry. Tao Yuanming & Manuscript Culture ...