Lyrical Experiments in Sinophone Verse

In China, every phase of modernization had its particular poetic forms and lyrical articulations. The 1919 May Fourth movement was the breeding ground for poetical experiments by authors inspired by new world literary trends. Under Mao Zedong, folk songs accompanied political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward. Misty Poetry of the 1980s contributed to the humanistic discourse of the post-Mao reform era. The most recent stage in Chinese poetry resonates with entangled local and global concerns, such as technological innovation, environmental anxieties, socio-political transformations, and the return of nationalist sentiments and Cold War divisions. In search for creative responses to the crisis, poets frequently revisit the past while holding on to their poetic language of self-reflection and social critique. This volume identifies three foci in contemporary poetry discourses: formal crossovers, multiple realities, and liquid boundaries. These three themes are anything but mutually disjunctive and often intersect within texts from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan discussed in the book.