On Chia-ying Chao Yeh's Comparative Poetic Study

Chia-ying Chao Yeh is a Chinese Canadian woman scholar.She is one of outstanding figures in the field of comparative poetics. Her publications include Collected Essays on Poetry , Collected Essays on Ci, Poetry without Music, Essays on Masterpieces of Ci Poetry during Tang and Song Dynasties, Seventeen Lectures on) Ci of Tang and Song Dynasties, Collected Essays on Ci in Qing Dynasty , Wang Guowei and His Literary Criticism , Collected Arguments on Eight Poems by Du Fu , Collected Lectures on Traditional Poetry and Ci , and My Road Toward Poetry and Ci, etc. But, there have been no adequate study on Chia-ying Chao Yeh's achievement in comparative poetics.Based on such a situation, this paper deals with Chia-ying Chao Yeh's poetics by holding most of her academic writings. The MA candidate probes into her way in traditional Chinese poetry within the western literary theory from the angle of comparison, focusing on her theory and practice in comparative poetics.According to her study periods, this paper deals with Chia-ying Chao Yeh's comparative poetics by three chapters, each of which is from her early to late periods. Holding the approach of both macro and micro analysis, the author probes into her academic features related to the modern critical style in her early period, for instance. Divided by three parts, the paper studies how Chia-ying Chao Yeh discusses traditional Chinese criticism, her way in dealing with the western and Chinese poetics and her way in traditional Chinese ci. For her late period, this paper mainly focuses on her aesthetic approach in the study of the traditional Chinese ci. Herspecial way to combine the western critical ideas to illuminate the problems within the field of ci. Then the author studies two relations Chia-ying Chao Yeh is involved, that is, the relation between her poetics and reception theory as well as the one with feminist criticism. In the conclusion, the author attempts to state that her way in comparative poetics should be an open one.This paper holds that the approach Chia-ying Chao Yeh has adopted is of illumination. With a solid training in the Chinese classics, she is strong in combining the modern western literary theory and criticism to deal with the Chinese literary studies. But she has always been beyond such combinations. Chia-ying Chao Yeh has defined as clearly as she could in some key conceptions in traditional Chinese poetics, such Yan Yu's Xingqu, Wang Shizhen's shenyun, and Wang Guowei's jingjie. She has also solved some of the remaining issues in traditional Chinese ci studies, such as the aesthetic nature of ci, the way to evaluate both strong and weak points in the study of ci by bi xingji tuo, the typical Chinese way and some of the disputes in the traditional Chinese literary history, such as wanyue and haofang, yazheng in wanyue, the differences between chenxiong andjiaoxiao.The systematic study of Chia-ying Chao Yeh's poetics is of beneficial significance for the field of Chinese comparative literature.