Michael Hunter is associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is the author of Confucius Beyond the Analects (2017) and coeditor of Confucius and the Analects Revisited: New Perspectives on Composition, Dating, and Authorship (2018).
An outstanding book focused on reconstructing the worldview of the Shijing and the role that worldview played in the development of early Chinese philosophy. This is a tremendously exciting work that will force a rethinking of many assumptions in the field concerning how we understand early Chinese thought. -- Michael Puett, coeditor of <i>The Huainanzi and Textual Production in Early China</i> This is a remarkably constructive book. Building upon the achievements of recent revisionist scholarship regarding the Shi and armed with the tools of the digital humanities, Hunter restores the Shi to its rightful place at the center of early Chinese thought as the text to which all other texts return. -- Griet Vankeerberghen, coeditor of <i>Chang'an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China</i> Hunter presents a radically different perspective on early Chinese literature, putting the Shi center stage and reading all other traditions through that genre. This shift is likely to generate lively debate in the entire field of early China studies and has the potential to open up new avenues of research. -- Matthias Richter, author of <i>The Embodied Text: Establishing Textual Identity in Early Chinese Manuscripts</i> This is an extremely refreshing and inspiring placement of the Odes at the center of thought from the Warring States into the early Chinese imperial period. Hunter convincingly shows how the notion of coming home pervades the Shi and, through them, a wide array of other texts. By doing this, he also reconsiders the dominance of all too familiar boundaries and academic disciplines. -- Carine Defoort, coeditor of <i> The Legitimacy of Chinese Philosophy</i> Reestablishing the Shijing as a text of major philosophical significance, The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought will not only incite vehement debates among scholars working on early Chinese thought, but also has the potential to open up new avenues of research in the entire field of early Chinese studies. -- Lisa Chu Shen * China Review * The exemplary clarity and convincing argumentation of [this] book contribute to a new way to study Chinese intellectual history, avoiding the myopic over-emphasizing of ‘Masters’ texts, and acknowledging the essentially important anonymous compositions amongst which the Shi are of paramount importance. -- Yegor Grebnev * Monumenta Serica *