Cross currents: American literature and Chinese modernism, Chinese culture and American modernism

The dissertation is a cross-cultural study of American and Chinese literatures in the modern period. The first group of writers I treat are Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist influence on twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture. I examine the cultural and political appropriation by China of nineteenth-century American literature in general. The second group of writers I discuss are the twentieth-century American Imagists, with emphasis on Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. I explore the affinity and relationships between Asian art and poetry and American modernism as represented by the Imagist poets. In the Chinese literary canon, I look into works of the Taoists, the High Tang "shanshui" poets, and modern writers such as Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Tian Han, and Ai Qing. The exploration of cross-cultural literary relations not only illuminates studies of individual writers and schools, but also reveals the actual functioning of appropriation and misunderstanding of one culture by another. Cultural and multi-cultural theories play a vital part in this study: I have particularly benefitted from Edward Said's Orientalism, Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination, Marianna Torgovnick's Gone Primitive, and theories of colonialism and post-colonialism in my work on cross-cultural interactions.; In this dissertation, my examination of American literature covers approximately seventy years, from 1855 when Whitman's Leaves of Grass was published to 1925 when Pound's Imagism was well established; on the Chinese side I also engage with seventy-odd years, from 1916-1990. However, my focal attention has been on two decades, 1910-1930, during which Chinese and American literary and cultural interactions took place for the first time on a large scale. This study utilizes comparative perspectives and it has as its intended audience Americanists, sinologists, and East-West comparatists. Through exploring the confluence and appropriation of two radically different literatures and cultures, I demonstrate the importance of international literary studies, the practicality of some degree of cultural fusion, and the potential that cultural and literary studies can have in support of one another in an interdisciplinary context.