Beth Harper is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her interests span premodern European and Chinese literature and thought, with a particular focus on tragedy, lyric, comparative east-west poetics and environmental philosophy. Her first book: Nothing but Time: the Lost Children of Tragedy from Euripides to Racine seeks to reframe the European tragic tradition from classical antiquity to the early modern period as a meditation on failed futurity. Her next project will examine how the literary cultures of ancient China and the Latin West use the lyric form to craft an art of life in dialogue with the natural world. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare, English Studies, postmedieval, Comparative Literature: East &West, and The Journal of East-West Thought.
Paper Title: Mountains, Meaning, Mediation: Petrarch’s “Ascent to Mont Ventoux” and the Chinese shanshui 山水 Tradition (Panel 3, 3B)