A modernity set to a pre-modern tune : : classical-style poetry of modern Chinese writers / / Haosheng Yang.

• Superior document: Ideas, History, and Modern China, Volume 14
• VerfasserIn: Yang, Haosheng,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill,, 2016.; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Ideas, history, and modern China ; Volume 14.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (265 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

In A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune , Haosheng Yang provides an in-depth study of the classical-style poems of the most iconoclastic May Fourth Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, and Nie Gannu) and highlights the five literary masters’ engagement with traditional lyricism as their critical response to the sociopolitical turbulence of twentieth-century China. This study challenges the bias against classical forms as allegedly outdated modes incapable of representing modern reality in current Chinese literary history. Yang’s fascinating book positions modern Chinese literature’s formalistic nonlinearity, representational experiences, and aspiration for a new voice through an old form as factors that are all crucial to exploring more fully the blurred boundary between the traditional and the modern.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- 1 The Call to Write: Lu Xun’s Poetic Self-Affirmation in a Time of Crisis -- 2 An Infatuation with a Skeleton: Yu Dafu’s Accidental Loyalism and Classical-Style Poetry -- 3 Affection or Disaffection: The Lyricism of the “Traitor” Zhou Zuoren -- 4 The Political Transformation of Romantic Lyricism: Guo Moruo’s Classical-Style Poems in Response to Mao Zedong -- 5 Hard to be Reformed: Nie Gannu and His Classical-Style Poems -- Conclusion -- Selected Bibliography -- Index.