Books by Paul Rouzer

Paul Rouzer is professor of Asian languages and literatures at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese and Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts.

In this first serious study of Hanshan (Cold Mountain), Paul Rouzer discusses some seventy poems of the iconic Chinese poet who lived sometime during the Tang dynasty (618907). Hanshans poems gained a large readership in English-speaking countries following the publication of Jack Kerouacs novel The Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyders translations (which began to appear that same year), and they have been translated into English more than any other body of Chinese verse. Rouzer investigates how Buddhism defined the way that believers may have read Hanshan in premodern times. He proposes a Buddhist poetics as a counter-model to the Confucian assumptions of Chinese literary thought and examines how texts by Kerouac, Snyder, and Jane Hirshfield respond to the East Asian Buddhist tradition.

This volume analyzes the representation of gender and desire in elite, male-authored literary texts in China dating from roughly 200 B.C. until 1000 A.D.

Forty lessons introducing students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.