Modern Poetry in China

Modern Poetry in China PDF Author: Paul Manfredi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604978629
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (general editor: Victor H. Mair). *Includes rare color images. Chinese poetry, along with many other art forms in China, underwent a highly self-conscious transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Poetry, perhaps more than any other art form, did so under the heavy burden of a voluminous literary precedent, a precedent which was in its very format of patterned words inscribed on scrolls--a mark of the Chinese literati tradition. Turning away from this tradition seemed necessary in the context of a political, social, and cultural reform movement (which was designed to strengthen China in the face of increasing international pressure as well as domestic breakdown). At the same time, reforming a poetic tradition which had served as a principal touchstone of aesthetic accomplishment--from its role in Confucian canon as object of contemplation for correct action, to its function as a test of candidate's qualifications to govern through the civil service examination, to its function as national past-time in all manner of social gathering--was a major challenge. The result of such a predicament for poets throughout the twentieth century has been the compulsion to discover a poetic style which resonates with the modern world and yet is rooted in Chinese cultural experience. One way in which poets have been able to accomplish this is by relying on poetry's visuality, be it in the graphic properties of the writing system itself, the visual context of the presentation of the poetic texts, or the acute image details in the poems. The history of approximately one century of modern Chinese poetry production has been addressed broadly in scholarship, but such broad strokes tend to miss important dynamics which fall outside of general narratives. The importance of Chinese visual tradition to modern Chinese poets is a good case in point. Accordingly, this book addresses specific manifestations of the nexus connecting modernity and visuality in Chinese poetry. It begins with a discussion of May Fourth poetics as exemplified in the groundbreaking work of Li Jinfa, China's first "Symbolist" poet. From there the book traces notable developments of visuality in the new form or free verse writing (called Xinshi or "New Poetry") through mid-century modernist experiments in Taiwan (focusing on Ji Xian). From there the book then explores the avant-garde poetry of Luo Qing and Xia Yu before returning to mainland Chinese developments of Misty poets Yan Li and his contemporaries. The work concludes with a wide variety of poet-artists writing and exhibiting in the twenty-first century. Looking across this period of modern Chinese poetry's development, one is able to observe how important the visual-verbal dynamic has been to the innovation of poetic style and method. From the twenty-first century on, such multi-media expressions will likely continue to grow; this is a function of a Chinese aesthetic tradition pairing word and image and will continue to manifest in new and more inventive ways. This is an important book for Asian literary and art history studies and history collections

Voices in Revolution

Voices in Revolution PDF Author: John A. Crespi
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824833651
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
China’s century of revolutionary change has been heard as much as seen, and nowhere is this more evident than in an auditory history of the modern Chinese poem. From Lu Xun’s seminal writings on literature to a recitation renaissance in urban centers today, poetics meets politics in the sounding voice of poetry. Supported throughout by vivid narration and accessible analysis, Voices in Revolution offers a literary history of modern China that makes the case for the importance of the auditory dimension of poetry in national, revolutionary, and postsocialist culture. Crespi brings the past to life by first examining the ideological changes to poetic voice during China’s early twentieth-century transition from empire to nation. He then traces the emergence of the spoken poem from the May Fourth period to the present, including its mobilization during the Anti-Japanese War, its incorporation into the student protest repertoire during China’s civil war, its role as a conflicted voice of Mao-era revolutionary passion, and finally its current adaptation to the cultural life of China’s party-guided market economy. Voices in Revolution alters the way we read by moving poems off the page and into the real time and space of literary activity. To all readers it offers an accessible yet conceptually fresh and often dramatic narration of China’s modern literary experience. Specialists will appreciate the book’s inclusion of noncanonical texts as well as its innovative interdisciplinary approach.

Modernist Poetics in China

Modernist Poetics in China PDF Author: Tiao Wang
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031009134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
This book examines organizations of consumerist economics, which developed at the turn of the twentieth century in the West and at the turn of the twenty-first century in China, in relation to modernist poetics. Consumerist economics include the artificial “person” of the corporation, the vertical integration of production, and consumption based upon desire as well as necessity. This book assumes that poetics can be understood as a theory in practice of how a world works. Tracing the relation of economics to poetics, the book analyzes the impersonality of indirect discourse in Qian Zhongshu and James Joyce; the impressionist discourses of Mang Ke and Ezra Pound; and discursive difficulty in Mo Yan and William Faulkner. Bringing together two notably distinct cultures and traditions, this book allows us to comprehend modernism as a theory in practice of lived experience in cultures organized around consumption.

Chinese Poetic Modernisms

Chinese Poetic Modernisms PDF Author: Paul Manfredi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004402896
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
This volume explores Chinese poetic modernism from its origins in the 1920s through 21st century manifestations. Modernisms as a title reflects the full complexity of the ideas and forms which can be associated with this literary-historical term.

Photo Poetics

Photo Poetics PDF Author: Shengqing Wu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 650

Book Description
Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China PDF Author: Xiaorong Li
Publisher: Cambria Sinophone World
ISBN: 9781604979527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
An invaluable resource to scholars of literary and intellectual movements in late imperial and modern China, sexuality, gender, literary decadence, modernism, countercultures, and erotic literature, this book offers the first literary history on an important movement spanning the late Ming to the early Republican era.

Orientalism and Modernism

Orientalism and Modernism PDF Author: Zhaoming Qian
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822316695
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Chinese culture held a well-known fascination for modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. What is less known but is made fully clear by Zhaoming Qian is the degree to which oriental culture made these poets the modernists they became. This ambitious and illuminating study shows that Orientalism, no less than French symbolism and Italian culture, is a constitutive element of Modernism. Consulting rare and unpublished materials, Qian traces Pound's and Williams's remarkable dialogues with the great Chinese poets--Qu Yuan, Li Bo, Wang Wei, and Bo Juyi--between 1913 and 1923. His investigation reveals that these exchanges contributed more than topical and thematic ideas to the Americans' work and suggests that their progressively modernist style is directly linked to a steadily growing contact and affinity for similar Chinese styles. He demonstrates, for example, how such influences as the ethics of pictorial representation, the style of ellipsis, allusion, and juxtaposition, and the Taoist/Zen-Buddhist notion of nonbeing/being made their way into Pound's pre-Fenollosan Chinese adaptations, Cathay, Lustra, and the Early Cantos, as well as Williams's Sour Grapes and Spring and All. Developing a new interpretation of important work by Pound and Williams, Orientalism and Modernism fills a significant gap in accounts of American Modernism, which can be seen here for the first time in its truly multicultural character.

A New Literary History of Modern China

A New Literary History of Modern China PDF Author: David Der-wei Wang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1033

Book Description
Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors, this landmark volume, edited by David Der-wei Wang, explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres, emphasizes Chinese authors’ influence on foreign writers as well as China’s receptivity to outside literary influences, and offers vibrant contrasting voices and points of view.

Dai Wangshu

Dai Wangshu PDF Author: Gregory Lee
Publisher: Chinese University Press
ISBN: 9789622014084
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description


New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry PDF Author: C. Lupke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
This book brings together fresh research from experts on contemporary Chinese poetry, built upon one of the most glorious poetic traditions of any civilization in the world yet historically neglected by scholars in English. This comprehensive volume offers readable and provocative treatments of many of the most important Chinese poets of our age.