Baudelaire in China: A Study in Literary Reception [Paperback]

Baudelaire's work entered China in the twentieth century amidst political and social upheavals accompanied by a literary revolution that called for classical models and modes of expression to be replaced by vernacular language and contemporary content. Chinese writers welcomed their meeting with the West and openly embraced Western literature as providing models in developing their new literature. Baudelaire's reception in China provides a representative study of this meeting of East and west. His work, which has been declared to stand between tradition and modernity, also lies at the intersection between classical and modern literature in China. Many of the best known and most highly regarded writers in twentieth-century China were drawn to Baudelaire's work, and some addressed it directly in their own writings. Bien draws upon H.R. Jauss's theory of the shifting and expanding horizons of expectation in the reading and interpretation of a literary work, and upon James J.Y. Lin's notion of worlds received and created by both author and reader, to show how poetic lines, images, and ideas, as well as Chinese critics' comments, eventually weave into a rich picture of Baudelaire's reception in China.Gloria Bien is professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Language and Literature at Colgate University.

Contents
Introduction
Part I. The Critical Reception
Chapter 1. Baudelaire and Traditional Chinese Poetry
Chapter 2. Horizons
Chapter 3. Baudelaire in Chinese Translation
Chapter 4. Baudelaire in Chinese Literary Criticism
Part II. The Creative Response
Chapter 5. Lu Xun & Xu Zhimo
Chapter 6. The Decadents
Chapter 7. Chinese Symbolists
Chapter 8. From Symbolism to Modernism
Chapter 9. Other comparisons
Summary and Conclusions
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Works cited  English and French
Works citedChinese
About the Author
Index