| This dissertation is a critical survey of the transformations of the cultural institution of poetry as China confronted modernity. Throughout the dissertation I analyze the social, cultural, and political forces that were involved in imagining a new poetics in modern China. As they grappled with poetic legacies, Chinese and foreign, writers such as Hu Shi, Wen Yiduo, Bian Zhilin, and Mu Dan sought to transform the foundations of sensibility and intelligibility through verse. From the seminal writings of Wang Guowei at the turn of the twentieth century, to wartime debates in the 1940s by such theorists as Zhu Guangqian and Feng Xuefeng, my dissertation surveys the role of poetics in a diverse range of leftist and rightist theories, including aesthetic autonomy, poetic form and subjective consciousness, the cultural politics of symbolism, wartime poetics, and experimental modernism. By exploring the discourses that forged new poetry as an imaginary site within which to inscribe and change the amorphous and fiercely contested complex of modernity, my dissertation contributes to a neglected strain of literary history and provides insights into the intricate role of lyrical experiences in twentieth-century cultural history. |
