From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature

Yi Zheng's book From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature is brilliant, intellectually inventive, and morally serious. Zheng is a global comparatist at home in English studies and in Chinese studies. She structures her book by an argument about modernity and culture, taking the England around the French Revolution and China in the early twentieth century. In both Instances, the modern is registered and elaborated in an aesthelic practice of the sublime. Sublime textual discontinuities produce the psychic exaltation that defines the experience for readers. She locates moments of blockte, repetition, and fracture in the writings of Burke, Wordsworth, and Guo, and she relates these to both the mass and individual grandeurs that her topic also engages. Zheng's study captures the ambiguity of figures who run ahead of culture. taking risks both in life and art that bring them to the far edge, yet who do so in order to preserve values, as well as to transform them. The sublime has attracted some of the best minds in recent criticism and theory, and Zheng joins their company to strike fresh insights and constellate new patterns in a prose that is both taut and eloquent, This is a notably original work. ---Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh

in this rare revisit of East-West comparative literature, Yi Zheng takes us beyond the convention of Influence study and tracks the parallel developments in European theories of the sublime (as formulated by Burke and Wordsworth) and in Guo Mouro's conceptualization of the sublime as a timely revolutionary spirit in early twentieth-century China. Attending equally to the aesthetics of the sublime and the historical conditions where differnt strands of theorization and creation arose in response to similar experiences of modernity, Zheng argues that the sublime possesses,) a special power in historical redirection and may thus serve as an aesthetic redemption of history. With its capacious and yet destructive force, the sublime endows literary agency and enables a modern Chinese writer like Guo (1892-1978) to create a new poetic form and a new poetic spirit at the same time, Examined through a comparative lens, the sublime proves to be eminently translatable across space and time, merging diverse cultural traditions, and generating new poetic persoane. Zheng's From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature is outstanding scholarship and sheds new light on modern Chinese and European literature and culture study. The book is an exciting addition to Purdue's series of books in Comparative Cultural Studies.---Yingjin Zhang, University of California San Diego

Yi Zheng is Senior Research Fellow at the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. Her single authored book publications include From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature (2011) and Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivation Middle Class Civility (2011) and she has published recently. with S. H. Donald, the articles "A Taste of Class: Manu-als for Becoming Woman" in positions: east asia cultures critique (2009) and "Chinese Modernisms" in the Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010)