Abstract
This thesis studies ten contemporary Chinese long poems by six poets as nodes in a network that encompasses both the recent decades of accelerating globalization and China’s millennia-long tradition. It unravels how the large scale of these poems allows these poets to reflect and respond to socio-historical change in China and the ongoing reconfiguration of inter-cultural relationships in a globalizing era. The long poem form helps these poets to articulate the connection between the past and the present through a renewed conception of tradition in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. In their long poems, the six poets actively engage with mythology, classical art, and past literary texts to address contemporary social change including such issues as urbanization, gender, media, capital, and labour. The poets also use the capaciousness of the long poem form to incorporate Chinese and foreign literary sources in response to the decline of Cold War oppositions in the 1980s and the advent of increasing global integration. These cross-temporal and cross-cultural engagements produce not only thematic diversity but also a formal variety ranging from epics to prose poems and including chronological and non-linear structures.
The long poems’ entanglements in past resources and in recent complex socio-historical changes in China and the wider world demonstrate an open network of cross-temporal and cross-cultural connections and dialogues. This open network calls into question the simplistic assumption that modern Chinese literature is a variation of modern literature from the West and offers an alternative to the centre-periphery paradigm in the study of cross-cultural interactions. The open-network framework for understanding contemporary Chinese long poems that I develop in this thesis does not overlook existing cultural power imbalances but instead directs attention to the multiplicity and complexity of cross-cultural interactions. All six poets explore and reflect the complexity of cross-cultural networks in a globalizing era, though from different perspectives. Haizi 海子 highlights Chinese tradition and cultural identity in the international literary arena, but he subtly strengthens cultural inequality by taking European epics as the benchmark for great verse. Zhai Yongming 翟永明 struggles to deal with the legacy of cultural and gender inequality, as her emphasis swings between difference and similarity. Chen Dongdong 陈东东criticizes the blithe cosmopolitanism of Shanghai nostalgia and reveals the existence of forces such as colonialism, racism, and their instrumental logic, nationalism. Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 and Zhai Yongming 翟永明 in their ekphrastic poems move a further step away from comparing cultures and towards exploring how artworks are produced through multi-directional cultural interactions. Xi Chuan 西川 and Yu Jian 于坚experiment with an anti-symbolist style and break free from conventional perceptions of text and context in studies of cross-temporal and cross-spatial literary interactions; their poems exemplify an open-network framework that challenges the centre-periphery paradigm in studies of world literature. Overall, I argue that the networks of contemporary Chinese long poems inspire us to view cultures and literary texts not as static entities but as dynamic, interactive processes of complex interactions and to question simplistic dichotomies between tradition and modernity, between China and the West, and between centre and periphery.