THE FU 賦 genre was one of the main genres of imperial Chinese literature from the Han dynasty to the fall of the Qing in 1911 and even beyond. The genre encompasses some of the most ambitious and finely wrought works in the tradition, while also reflecting key developments in politics, society, gender relations, material culture, economics, and much else. Because one of the distinctive features of the fu is its length, it can be difficult to examine the genre seriously within the space of a conventional academic article. This volume presents detailed studies of five fu poems intended to elucidate their formal features and also broader historical significance. While the limited scope of the volume represents only a tiny soupçon of the genre as a whole, each study compensates for this selectivity by showing the interconnections of each text with a much broader world beyond the fu genre itself.

The complex etymology of its name has sometimes distracted from the content of the fu genre itself. The term fu can be traced back to several sources in early China, firstly its use as one of the basic six principles of the Shijing 詩經 (Book of songs), the poetry classic. In comparison to the more elusive modes of bi 比 “comparison” and xing 興 “stimulus,” it is said to be a more direct kind of description of a given situation. But as the name of a genre, “fu” probably derives more directly from this word's sense of “recitation,” since fu poems were originally recited in court, rather than being sung with music like the poems of the Shijing. The fu was generally a long composition employing rhyme and elaborate verbal devices. One of its most distinctive features is the heavy use of descriptive compounds (known in Chinese as lianmian ci 連綿詞), either rhyming or alliterative compounds of two Chinese characters, which pose a special challenge to the reader.

The abundance of ornate rhetoric in the early fu, especially, seems intended precisely to compensate for the absence of accompanying music, which would have been typical for the earlier Shijing tradition.