More than two decades ago, Anne Birrell made an important contribution to the field of medieval Chinese poetry by translating into English Xu Ling's (507–83) entire anthology, Yutai xinyong (New Songs from a Jade Terrace). In her most recent book, Games Poets Play: Readings in Medieval Chinese Poetry, she again offers interesting, illuminating, but controversial reading and analysis by applying Western postmodernism to the study of this medieval Chinese anthology (pp. 10–13). She believes that postmodern approaches can provide “new strategies for analyzing silent codes and hidden structures” (p. 341) in the poems, arguing that poets skillfully conceal their meaning to their contemporary readers and to those of us who are “distanced from the work through time and cultural space” (p. 341). Birrell reads the entire anthology as a masterwork of amatory verse. She groups and analyzes the poems through a variety of postmodern topics such as gendered power...
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