Greg Patterson's book, Elegies for Empire: A Poetics of Memory in the Late Work of Du Fu (Harvard Asia Center), is now available from Havard University Asia Center.

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.