| This dissertation engages aspects of cultural studies, translation studies, and genre theories and examines issues of continuity and change, cultural values and genre-formation in the development of modern Chinese poetry with an emphasis on the theme of its continuing struggle to claim a legitimate identity in the scene of China's cultural renaissance. As it fights for breathing room between the specters of traditional and Western influences, modern Chinese poetry exhibits a desire both to resist and to admit such influences, which makes the construction of a viable generic identity a highly volatile affair: the cultural identity of modern Chinese poetry has been very elusive as it constantly supersedes itself with one new form after another. The reason that modern Chinese poetry is able to sustain its on-going search for significance and meaning, the author submits, is its use of translation as a generative force, a literary matrix upon which various experiments are tested and new questions are raised. Translation practice, as it is invoked in this context, is more than the usual linguistic transference; it involves a whole range of studying and borrowing for the condition of writing and reading literature, both in time (traditional aesthetics) and in space (Western poetics). Using translation as a point of entry, the dissertation investigates the subtle revolution of late Qing poetry, the aesthetic dilemma in the choice between free verse and regulated verse, the ideological values undercutting the debate on the forms of xiaoshi (little poetry) and the sonnet, the positionality of the modern Chinese poet vis-a-vis the reader and the world, and the cross-cultural confluence in the phenomenon of Menglongshi (Misty poetry). As illustrations of these paradoxical choices, a number of prominent poets including Huang Zunxian (1848-1905), Hu Shi (1891-1962), Zhu Xiang (1904-1933) and Bei Dao (1949-) are studied in depth with the purpose of accentuating modern Chinese poetry as a writing in crisis and its discourse on modernity as translation and revision. |
