Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937

Abstract

Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937, by Shengqing Wu. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center: 2013. Pp. xviii + 437. $49.95 (hardcover).Shengqing Wu's remarkable monograph on traditional-style poetry of the early twentieth century is built on a straightforward yet highly persuasive premise: With its long tradition and its central role in the formation and articulation of moral, aesthetic, and political beliefs among the elites of China's dynastic past, classical-style poetry (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) could not possibly have lost all its discursive significance when the dynastic system was replaced by the Chinese Republic in 1912 and regulated verse written in classical Chinese began to be challenged by intellectuals of the New Culture movement such as Hu Shi (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) or Chen Duxiu who instead promoted free verse and fiction written in the new Chinese vernacular. Yet the New Culturists' denouncement of contemporary poetry written in traditional styles as the epitome of traditional cultural practices that they saw as inert, ideologically backward, and serving as an impediment to the implementation of a universalizing modernization was so emphatic that it resulted in an essentialist linking between ideology and form that has obstructed the treatment of such verse as part of Chinese literary modernity ever since. Despite its persistence as a cultural practice throughout the first part of twentieth century, classical-style poetry or its role as a medium for late Qing dynasty intellectuals to negotiate their changing social and cultural environment as they found themselves caught in the maelstrom of history has received little critical discussion in Western scholarship on modern Chinese literature. (An exception is Jon von Kowallis' monograph The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the Old Schools during Late Qing and Early Republican China (2006), a book Wu frequently cites.) By analyzing the innovation that occurred in traditional style ci and shi poetic forms and practices during the first decades of the twentieth century, Wu attempts to treat tradition as a vibrant site and an exploratory device to detect dynamic reciprocity and dramatic confrontation between the modern and the archaic [...](9). By reading the apparent traditionalmodern antithesis dialectically, Wu suggests that classical-style poetry composed in the first three decades of the twentieth century became at the hands of its practitioners a textual and social space for subjective reflection, literary imagination, and stylistic innovation that further allowed these intellectuals to reaffirm their collective identity and to re-consolidate their cultural memory.Divided into three parts with two chapters each, Wu's monograph is arranged roughly chronologically, both in the way she presents the poets and their works, and in the way she moves along the historical trajectory of modern China, from the 1900 to the mid-1930s. Part one, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poetry of Mourning, starts with a chapter that analyzes a large body of d-style poetry composed in response to the events surrounding the attack on Beijing by the Eight Allied Forces in 1900 in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion. Forming part of which is commonly referred to as literature of the Gengzi year (JPE^-jfcC) (1900), these d-poems, many of which lamented the drowning of the consort Zhen Fei, were composed by a number of middle- and lower court officials and are characterized by what Wu defines as their ornamental lyricism-namely, the extensive use of literary conventions and allusions, as well as the use of bi ht (metaphorical comparison) and xing PI (affective images). Informed by the work of Raymond Williams, Wu argues that Zhen Fei in these dpoems became a semantic figure and a metaphor for the crumbling socio-political structure that was in turn decoded by a closely-knit group of readers involved in these events. …