Yi Zheng teaches literature at the University of Sydney. Her recent publications include Civility and Class in Contemporary Chinese Print Media (2010).
John O. Jordan. "Recent Studies in Nineteenth Century" Studies in
English Literature 1500-1900. The Nineteenth Century, Volume 52,
Autumn 2012, Number 4: pp 947A more ambitious and more
theoretically grounded study is Yi Zheng's From Burke and
Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature. Like
Lussier, Zheng avoids
claims for direct influence, arguing instead for the sublime as an
aesthetic-historical category that applies equally well to the
modernity crisis of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
Britain, as experienced by Burke and Wordsworth, and to the
analogous crisis of China's confrontation with the West during the
early part of the twentieth century. Zheng focuses the second half
of her book on the work of Moruo Guo, a leader of the New Culture
Movement in Chinese poetry. For Guo, as for Burke and Wordsworth,
she argues, the sublime offered a way to negotiate the terrors and
disruptions of modernity and to give new form and expression to
these traumatic experiences.
Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh"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 England around the French Revolution and China in
the early twentieth century. In both instances, the modern is
registered and elaborated in an aesthetic practice of the sublime.
Sublime textual discontinuities produce the psychic exaltation that
defines the experience for readers. She locates moments of
blockage, 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."
Yingjin Zhang, University of California San Diego"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 different 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 personae. 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."
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