American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter

Z. Yuejun, S. Christie, Z. Yuejun, S. Christie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230391710
• eBook ISBN: 9780230391727
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous, the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in the English language, for the rise of China in the American imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese universities working on American literature and comparative cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and students in the west.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Entry
• 1 "Between Walls": So Much Depends on Chinese Immigrant Poetry in Defining the Modernist Age
• 2 H. T. Tsiang's Poems of the Chinese Revolution and Transpacific Bridges to a Radical Past
• Part II Influence
• 3 Usurious Translation: From Chinese Character to Western Ideology in Pound's Confucian "Terminology"
• 4 Wandering Lost upon the Mountains of Our Choice: W. H. Auden's "In Time of War"
• 5 China and the Political Imagination in Langston Hughes's Poetry
• 6 Allen Ginsberg's "China"
• 7 Grievance of the Gendered Self: Chinese Guiyuan Elements in Carolyn Kizer's Poems
• 8 Jane Hirshfield's Poetic Voice and Zen Meditation
• Note on Contributors
• Index
• Index of Chinese Sources and Uses