New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

the disenchantment of the life-world, a power that can sustain that anarchic love of nature that is a characteristic feature of ...

reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle” (Camus 1966: 297). Depending on the thinker, anxiety may be likened ...

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Chapter Seven Opposition and Adaptation in the Poetry of Zhai Yongming and Xia Yu Andrea Lingenfelter Only a year apart in age, ...

subjects (in particular female anger and sexuality), and the ways in which each employs familiar elements of traditional thought ...

both have intimately described a woman’s life in ways that are unprecedented in their bluntness and honesty. Such pieces account ...

But we’re indispensable, we three sisters Slim and graceful, we glide to and fro Looking like sure winners But I mean to make mi ...

Risk it all on one throw, I tell myself “Home is the place we leave” Marriage here is presented as undesirable yet inescapable, ...

One penalty for remaining single is to be childless; and in the nar- rator’s cultural milieu, a childless state carries some ele ...

wriggles in a tiny aquarium) The animal says: Yes, I will. The wedding is a ritual from which the narrator feels so alienated th ...

and that now she has thought of a way to get even. The revenge is clearly symbolic, as it is the antagonist’s “shadow” 1 Ê, or h ...

her. There may be a fine shade of difference between these two inter- pretations, but the second reading places less emphasis on ...

early works such as “The Black Room,” as well as in her ground- breaking twenty-poem cycle “Woman,” which was written in 1984 an ...

among women) of her poetry and her point of view, and she was not comfortable with the overwhelming response to the “Woman” cycl ...

A mountain range is dragged away by the darkness like a corpse Nearby the heartbeat of a shrub is just barely audible Those huge ...

commune with one another and trade secrets, that secrecy itself is also draining for the narrator. Attendant to this sense of fa ...

“Woman.” Rather than experiencing night and darkness as oppressive, Zhai Yongming transforms them into sources of strength. At t ...

she describes Xia Yu as a woman-centric poet, a rarity among modern women poets in Taiwan. Chung argues that although she is les ...

Notes A book-length translation of Xia’s work was published under the Wade- Giles spelling Hsia Yü. See Bradbury 2001. Tang Xia ...

Part II Contemporary Poetry of Mainland China ...