The Modernist Response to Chineese Art

by Qian, Zhaoming

• ISBN13: 9780813921761
• ISBN10: 0813921767
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr

Summary

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 With forty rare and previously unpublished photographs presented with accompanying analysis, this study reconstructs the three poets' dialogue with the Chinese masters.In addition to examining Canto 49,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.

Author Biography

Zhaoming Qian, Professor of English at the University of New Orleans

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
List of Abbreviations	xi
Preface	xv
PART 1 China in Galleries
1. Pound and Chinese Art in the "British Museum Era"	3	(19)
2. Chinese Art Arrives in America: Stevens and Moore	22	(25)
PART 2 Remaking Culture
3. Pound and Pictures of Confucian Ideals	47	(17)
4. The Eternal Dao: Pound and Moore	64	(17)
5. Stevens and Chan Art	81	(18)
PART 3 Picturing the Other
6. Stevens's "Six Significant Landscapes"	99	(12)
7. Moore and Ming-Qing Porcelain: "Nine Nectarines"	111	(12)
8. Pound's Seven Lakes Canto	123	(18)
PART 4 The Poets as Critics and Connoisseurs
9. Pound, Fenollosa, and The Chinese Written Character	141	(14)
l0. Stevens as Art Collector	155	(12)
11. Moore and The Tao of Painting	167	(14)
PART 5 Late Modernism and the Orient
12. Moore and 0 to Be a Dragon	181	(12)
13. Nothingness and Late Stevens	193	(14)
14. The Chinese in Rock-Drill and Thrones	207	(18)
Appendix: Moore's Typescript for "Tedium and Integrity"	225	(4)
Notes	229	(34)
Index	263