MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Haihong Yang’s review of Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, by Zhiyi Yang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/haihong-yang/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Poetry, History, Memory:
Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times
By Zhiyi Yang
Reviewed by Haihong Yang
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2024)
In the Chinese literary tradition, lyric poetry is often hailed as a necessary supplement to official histories. The famous quote “words reflect the heart-mind” (言為心聲) suggests that poetic language is an almost transparent medium of the writer’s inner thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. Classical poems are often cherished for their biographical value because they are thought to delineate a writer’s political inclinations, personality, and literary competence. Collectively, they portray a society’s political and cultural landscape. In the past few decades, scholars of classical Chinese poetry have challenged the conflation of a historical subject with a poetic one and the presumed binaries between the inside of a person (heart-mind) and the outside (language), the individual and society, and history and poetry. Zhiyi Yang’s Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times is a significant addition to these non-binary scholarly examinations of a writer and his era. The book provides a nuanced analysis of a slice of modern Chinese history, bringing one of it most controversial figures, Wang Jingwei (汪精衞), under a critical lens. Through an innovative theoretical approach, thorough archival research and fieldwork, and astute close readings of poetic texts, Yang investigates the complex interrelationship between the textual subject, the human subject, and the collective cultural memory of the former two.
The book consists of two main parts (each of which is comprised of three chapters that are themselves made up of four to eleven separately titled subsections): “Part I: The End of Literati Politics,” which is a critical biography of Wang Jingwei, and “Part II: The Poetics of Memory,” comprising a study of the complex relations between Wang’s poetry, cultural memory, and historiographies. The author divides Wang Jingwei’s life into three stages: his status as a revolutionary pioneer, his reputation as a well-respected statesman, and his being labeled a national “traitor” [quotation marks in the original]. Whereas Yang’s narration of Wang’s life follows a chronological order, the three chapters in Part I of the book employ distinct ways of organizing important personal and historical events. Continue reading Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times review →
