Shengqing Wu is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University.
A broad reassessment of the place of classical poetry in early
twentieth-century China. Shengqing Wu shows how the old lyrical
forms were turned to new purposes to help negotiate China’s
emergent modernity. This is a story about modern Chinese literature
that has not been told before.
*Ronald Egan, Stanford University*
Modern Archaics challenges the conventional wisdom that
dichotomizes modern and traditional forms of writing. By examining
classical-style poetry written at a time of radical
anti-traditionalism, Shengqing Wu ushers us into a world beyond the
conventional territory of the modern. She argues that the writing
and appraisal of classical-style poetry carried on with remarkable
vigor and variety during the century of modern literature, and that
at crucial historical junctures, the genre exerted an enormous
power where new literature failed in representing modern China in
crisis. Wu examines classical-style verse and its transformation in
terms of stylistic experimentation, thematic contestation, and
cultural production. This is a field yet to be explored by scholars
and students in modern Chinese literature and culture; as the first
of its kind, Modern Archaics is bound to draw attention.
*David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University*
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