About

Ronald Egan is the Stanford W. Ascherman, M.D. Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. His research focuses on Chinese poetry, Song dynasty poetry and literati culture, and the social and historical context of Song dynasty aesthetics. Egan has made significant contributions to the understanding of Chinese literary history, particularly through his work on Song dynasty literature, the circulation of books, and the aesthetic thought of the period. He has held academic appointments at Stanford since 2012 and previously served as a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was also the department chair and an affiliated faculty member in comparative literature. Egan's scholarly work includes editing and authoring numerous publications on Chinese literature, and he has been actively involved in academic editorial roles and professional organizations related to East Asian studies. His expertise encompasses Chinese poetry, literary criticism, and the social history of Chinese texts, making him a prominent figure in the field of Chinese literary studies.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• Art history
• History
• Mathematics
• Geometry
• Aesthetics
• Paleontology
• Geology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi

  2025-01-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The prose writings of Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) and Su Shi (1037–1101) receive attention in all standard histories of Chinese literature. But rather than thinking of this pair simply as two talented individuals who produced a few stellar essays that have become literary chestnuts in anthologies and narrative accounts, this discussion will try to situate the prose of Ouyang and Su in a larger context and view their two corpora of this kind of writing as seminal in certain ways even when placed in the entire sweep of Chinese literary history. There is another way this chapter will diverge from standard accounts. The prose of these two scholar-officials is conventionally thought of as the second stage or “act” of what is termed the Ancient Prose Style Movement (guwen yundong), the first belonging to their Tang predecessors, led by Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 5 LI QINGZHAO’S RHAPSODY ON CAPTURE THE HORSE

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Geology
  • Paleontology
  PublisherDOI

• Poems on Painting from the High Tang to Later Tang Periods

  Early Medieval China · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: That the practice of inscribing poems on paintings was brought to new prominence during the High Tang period is a well-known aspect of literary history. That poets' ways of treating paintings in poems changed again in the late eighth and ninth centuries is a less well-known development. This article looks at that change and analyzes several of its manifestations, including new treatments of the “illusion” of painting, the relationship of the painter to his art, and the relationship of painting to poetry. Also briefly discussed is the new closeness between the poets of the later period and the painters they wrote about. Several of these changes anticipate the emergence of “literati painting” in the Northern Song period and allow us to see the later Tang period as an important transitional bridge between poetic treatments of painting before and after it.

  PublisherDOI

• The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron: A Contribution to the Flowering Plum Imagery in the in the Song and Yuan Dynasties

  Journal of Sung-Yuan studies · 2021-01-01

  articleSenior author

  The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron:A Contribution to the Flowering Plum Imagery in the in the Song and Yuan Dynasties Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman Appreciation by Ronald Egan New Appreciation Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman, "The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron: A Contribution to the History of Flowering-Plum Imagery in the Song and Yuan Dynasties," JSYS 26 (1996): 1–54. It is good to be reminded that history exists and even that it matters. In the case of Chinese cultural history, because the time span is so long and the native reverence for the past is so strong, historical change may be difficult to spot. Genuine innovation is often packaged as a "return to ancient times." The situation is further complicated by the persistence of the practice of forging artifacts that claim to be from centuries earlier but actually embody the values and tastes of their own later time. Insight into a case involving emergent aesthetic values superimposed upon dubious older chronology is one of the contributions made by this lengthy article by Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman. An elaborate literary exposition, a fu 賦 on the flowering plum, which is attributed to the Tang figure Song Jing 宋璟 (663–737), is shown to embody elements that are inconsistent with literary work of his time and suggest a much later date, that of the twelfth or thirteenth century, a period that happens to coincide with a new vogue of enthusiasm for the flowering plum in poetry and painting. There are technical components of this new understanding of the real date of Song Jing's fu (e.g., the rhyme scheme in the piece does not match eighth-century practice). But what is of greater interest for historians of culture and aesthetics is that the qualities for which the pseudo-Song Jing poem celebrates the plum blossom—delicate sensual beauty combined, surprisingly enough, with tenacity and a "heart of iron"—is at odds with early Tang writings about the flower but is a fine match with those in the Southern Song. The Song period fervor among literati for the plum blossom (sometimes called a cult) manifested itself as much in painting as it did in poetry, and the later part of the article delves into the images and aesthetics of plum blossom painting, explaining their underlying values, as it follows the fame of Song Jing and the plum blossom associated with him through the late Southern Song and into the Yuan. This is the other major contribution of this article, its demonstration of the advantages of bringing specialists in the two fields together (Bickford in painting, Hartman in poetry) to examine such cultural [End Page 33] phenomena. As we know, many literati in the Song and later periods of Chinese history were conversant in both of those fields and moved back and forth readily between them, as producers and critics. Today, our training in Chinese studies tends to draw a sharp division between literary and art historical acumen. Few of us are qualified to undertake studies of this kind that benefit from looking across that division. This situation is not likely to change any time soon. This study, then, may serve as a model for future collaborative research projects by literary and art historians. The article evinces prodigious learning in the original materials (textual and pictorial), close reading of difficult poems and meticulous translation, a keen eye for dubious claims about textual provenance, and above all a deep understanding of the rather peculiar aesthetic associated with the flowering plum in nature and, even more, in the arts that matured during the Southern Song and lived on thereafter. ronald egan stanford university [End Page 34] Among the most striking features of Chinese artistic expression is the incessant manipulation of a limited set of rhetorical epithets—fixed adjectives, metaphors, conceits, allusions—to describe the same topic. As early as the Six Dynasties period, literary handbooks and encyclopedias collected descriptive snippets and arranged them under the appropriate related themes. Both inspired and insipid writers drew upon these rhetorical stocks to compose the relentless stream of text that now comprises the canon of traditional Chinese literature, especially poetry. So too...

  PublisherDOI

• Poems on Painting from the High Tang to Later Tang Periods

  Early Medieval China · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Literature
  • History

  That the practice of inscribing poems on paintings was brought to new prominence during the High Tang period is a well-known aspect of literary history. That poets’ ways of treating paintings in poems changed again in the late eighth and ninth centuries is a less well-known development. This article looks at that change and analyzes several of its manifestations, including new treatments of the “illusion” of painting, the relationship of the painter to his art, and the relationship of painting to poetry. Also briefly discussed is the new closeness between the poets of the later period and the painters they wrote about. Several of these changes anticipate the emergence of “literati painting” in the Northern Song period and allow us to see the later Tang period as an important transitional bridge between poetic treatments of painting before and after it.

  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 42 LIBRARIES FROM SONG TO QING

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ming-Qing Paintings Inscribed with Du Fu’s Poetic Lines

  Hong Kong University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  • Literature
  PublisherDOI

• 8. Ming-Qing Paintings Inscribed with Du Fu’s Poetic Lines

  Hong Kong University Press eBooks · 2020-06-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Qingtong qi yu Songdai wenhua shi 青銅器與宋代文化史 [Bronze Vessels and Song Dynasty Cultural History], written by Chen Fangmei 陳芳妹

  Journal of Chinese Humanities · 2020-07-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  陳芳妹 over the past fifteen years.The volume represents the results of Chen's studies on Song dynasty research into ancient bronze vessels.Chen is a leading scholar in Taiwan in the field of bronze vessels, with a background in early Chinese archaeology.The five lengthy papers in this volume were originally published between 2001 and 2015.Although the topical focus and publication dates of the five papers vary, they revolve around common themes and concerns, which Chen characterizes in her introduction with the question: "Why is it that such material objects already extant at the time of Confucius, such as the jue 爵, ding 鼎, and fu 簠, with their characteristic shape and ornamentation, enjoyed a longevity of two thousand years after the end of the Bronze Age, during which millennia they widely circulated?" (p.iii).The five papers all have their starting point in this question, implicitly or explicitly.Each paper explains why these vessels from the three ancient dynasties had a new life in the Song and what meaning their rebirth had in Song cultural history.Interest in bronze vessels during the Song dynasty had a very complicated sociological background.Consequently, in addition to examining archaeological materials and Song writings concerning them, Chen reconstructs the historical setting of bronze vessel revivalism during the Song, as it existed in different social classes, and how it changed over time.In chapter 1, the author argues that Diagrams of the Three Rites Classics [Sanli tu 三禮圖], by Nie Chongyi 聶崇義 [fl.962], was the beginning of the Song period investigations into these ancient vessels.This work relied completely on earlier classical commentaries for its understanding of the vessels, adhering to the doctrine of "explicating the vessel according to textual accounts of it" [尊文譯器，依經繪圖].But, starting with the middle period of the Northern Song , scholars such as Liu Chang 劉敞 and Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 represented a new breed of researchers who broke free of the shackles of through Tang [618-907] classical commentaries.By examining pre-Qin vessels, these scholars founded their own understanding of ritual vessels, thus opening a new path in this field of inquiry.Kaogu tu 考古圖, by Lü Dalin 呂大臨 , advanced this approach, making it more academic and systematic.Then, in the reign of emperor Huizong 宋徽宗 [r.1101-1125], at the end of the Northern Song, with

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ming-Qing Paintings Inscribed with Du Fu’s Poetic Lines

  Hong Kong University Press eBooks · 2020-09-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Ming-Qing painters who engaged in the increasingly widespread practice of inscribing lines from Tang and Song poems on their paintings were especially drawn to Du Fu. It was not only Du Fu’s fame but also the intrinsic qualities of his lines that appealed to and challenged the artists as they rendered Du Fu’s couplets in a different medium. This chapter looks at the interaction between the new paintings and old poetic lines that the artists themselves added to their paintings, focusing on two albums of Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts by the seventeenth-century painters Wang Shimin and Shitao. The styles of these two artists diverge sharply, but so too do the ways they adapted their paintings to Du Fu’s lines. Their creative and divergent representations of the Tang poet’s lines may be viewed as another component of Du Fu’s legacy. It is one that, to be sure, lies outside of literary history but is very much a part of aesthetics and cultural history.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kang-i Sun Chang

  3 shared

• André Lévy

  Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

  2 shared

• Ou-yang Hsiu

  2 shared

• Zhongshu Qian

  City University of Hong Kong

  1 shared

• Michael Fuller

  1 shared

• James M. Hargett

  1 shared

• Beata Grant

  Washington University in St. Louis

  1 shared

• I Lo-fen

  1 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Education

• Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Civilizations

  Harvard University

  1982

• M.A., East Asian Languages and Civilizations

  Harvard University

• B.A., East Asian Languages and Civilizations

  Harvard University

• Other, East Asian Languages and Civilizations

  Harvard University

  1977

• Other, East Asian Languages and Civilizations

  Harvard University

  1976

• Other, Ouyang Xiu project

  American Council of Learned Societies

  1980

• Other, Chinese

  Wellesley College

  1986

• Other, Chinese

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1987

• Other, Chinese

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1987

• Other, Chinese

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1993

• Other, Comparative Literature

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1992

• Other, Comparative Literature

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2002

• Other, Chinese, Translation, and Linguistics

  City University of Hong Kong

  2001

• Other, East Asian Languages and Cultures

  UCLA

  1997

• Other, Chinese

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2012

• Other, East Asian Languages and Cultures

  Stanford University

  2012