• "[Qian's goal] to establish the
plural grounds of influence...is impressively achieved through ample
and meticulously researched biographical details, accounts of gallery
and museum exhibitions in America and England, and summaries of
Chinese spiritual and aesthetic traditions.... Impediments to interart
studies seem to be lifting finally where poetry is concerned, and
Zhaoming Qian's book is a strong contribution in this direction."
—The Wallace Stevens Journal
• “The Modernist Response to Chinese Art is a
work of both erudition and sympathy that reveals the root of modernist
poets’ otherwise baffling interest in and use of Chinese art.
Most impressive, perhaps, is the depth of their embrace of it, as
Qian has so convincingly documented.”
—Patricia C. Willis, Yale University, author of Marianne
Moore
• “Qian provides a scrupulously scholarly and valuable
study—a goldmine of important and useful facts and insights.”
—Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University, author of Twenty-first-
Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics
• “Enormously impressive, The Modernist Response to
Chinese Art will be highly useful to all levels of readers in
Pound, Moore, and Stevens, and absolutely indispensable to scholars
sorting out the development of the three poets’ work.”
—Ronald Bush, St. John’s College, Oxford, author of The
Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Canto
|
The Modernist Response to
Chinese Art:
Pound, Moore, Stevens
|
| by Zhaoming Qian |
| 296 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 42 b&w illustrations |
| Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2175-9 • $59.50 |
| Paper ISBN 0-8139-2176-7 • $22.50 |
 |
To see a gallery of artworks discussed
in this book, click here.
For the Table of Contents, click here.
"[A] richly illustrated and convincingly argued book....
Qian has opened wide the gates of understanding and appreciation
to a subject few had the linguistic and cultural background to
explain. Highly recommended."
—CHOICE
"Qian's book is both impressively erudite and highly readable,
sustained by lucid writing, insightful perceptions, and cogent
arguments. By exploring a hitherto overlooked subject, his inquiry
makes significant contributions to several fields, including modernist
poetry, comparative literature, and transnational cultural production.
More intriguingly, it also raises issues impelling us to reconceptualize
the enterprise of orientalism."
—Twentieth Century Literature
(read the entire review here)
What role did Chinese art play in the poetic development of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens? How could they share Chinese artists’ Dao, an aesthetic held to be beyond verbal representation? In this sequel to his critically acclaimed study Orientalism and Modernism, Zhaoming Qian investigates the ways in which these three modernist poets received Chinese artistic notions and assimilated them into their literary masterpieces. With forty rare and previously unpublished photographs presented with accompanying analysis, this study reconstructs the three poets’ dialogue with the Chinese masters.
In addition to examining Canto 49, “Nine Nectarines,”
and “Six Significant Landscapes,” by Pound, Moore, and
Stevens, respectively, Qian provides indispensable historical
and cultural material never before recorded in a single work.
The Modernist Response to Chinese Art pays long-overdue
attention to the role of several early collections of Chinese
art in England and America; it clarifies some common misconceptions
about Confucianism and Daoism; it identifies in the modernist
poets both linkage to and revolt against their predecessors’—and
peers’—hegemonic Orientalism; and it intensifies awareness
of modernist Orientalism not as a monolithic and constant conception
but as a slippery and shifting process.
Zhaoming Qian, Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, is the author of Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams and the editor of Ezra Pound and China.
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