A remarkable cultural encounter: The reception of German Romanticism, Rilke, and modernism in Feng Zhi's poetry

This dissertation, written with the intention of publishing it initially in Chinese, examines the literary relationship between the modern Chinese poet Feng Zhi (1905--1993) and German literature.;The dissertation starts with tracing how the European sonnet developed within the European cultural framework, then turns to discussing how Rilke broke and lifted and ultimately "saved" this genre with his experiment--a good example of the deconstructionist strategy of "containment through subversion"--and finally shows how the European sonnet culture was expropriated into Chinese through Feng's creative imitation and what was subjoined to it in the course of translingual practice. In addition to a reassessment of the German ballad tradition and Feng Zhi's adaptation of it, the dissertation also presents various Orphic motives as perceived by Rilke, such as the favorite image of trees, transition and communication between the "double realms," and the role of the modern poet as a divine messenger, and identifies the manifestations of the kindred motives in Feng's Sonnets Collection .;The dissertation suggests that Feng's reception of the late Rainer Maria Rilke be regarded as a positive response to the main stream of the German poetic tradition, as represented by Goethe through Novalis and down to the German Modernists. As to how and why Feng's creative imitation of Rilke eventually occurred, I argue that the younger Feng Zhi, though nurtured in traditional Chinese culture, had already developed a kind of poetic comprehension of German which was analogous to that acquired by Rilke, and that after having been exposed to Rilke's works his latent comprehension became vividly conscious. The Chinese tradition, even if Feng makes no explicit mention of his awareness of the fact, has nevertheless functioned everywhere and continuously as an unconscious literary foundation in Feng's entire body of work.;At the end of the dissertation, English translations of thirty-nine poems have been provided, which include all of Feng's twenty-seven sonnets, five ballads and seven other lyrics.