Stephen Owen
The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry.
Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 261. 0674021363 360 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.5", is bound in burgundy cloth, with stamped silver lettering to spine. Book and dust jacket are like new. Names of previous owners are discreetly stamped in upper outside corner of front flyleaf. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover. 
"Over the centuries, "early Chinese classical poetry" became embedded in a chronological account with great cultural resonance and came to be transmitted in versions accepted as authoritative. Modern scholarship has questioned components of the account and cast doubt of the accuracy of received texts, but at the risk of detaching individual poems from the historical network and notions of authorship that confer meaning. The result has been to destabilize the history of early Chinese poetry.
This study adopts a double approach to he poetry composed between the end of the first century BCE and the third century CE. First, it examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged with some poems attached to authors and some not. By setting aside putative differences of author and genre, we can, Stephen Owen argues, see that this was "one poetry," created from a share poetic repertoire and compositional practices.
Second, it considers how the scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.
As Owen shows, early poetry comes to us through reproduction - reproduction by those who knew the poem and transmitted it, by musicians who performed it, by scribes and anthologists - all of whom changed texts to suit their needs. Poems grew and shrank with freedom."