Convergence of East-West Poetics: Williams's Negotiation with the Chinese Landscape Tradition

by Zhanghui Yang

Overview

The present book examines William Carlos Williams’s negotiation with cultural modes and systems of the Chinese landscape tradition in his landscape writing. Focusing on Walliams’s landscape modes of landscape with(out) infused emotions, the book builds a linkage between their interactions with Chinese landscape aesthetics and shows how these conversations helped shape Williams’s cross-cultural landscape poetics. The exploration of Williams’s experiment with the Chinese serene interplay of self and landscape, the interfusion of scene and emotion, an idea of seeing from the perspective of Wang Guowei’s theory of jingjie, and the poetic space of frustration and completion in the context of space and human geography, expand the understanding of a cross-cultural landscape tradition developed by Williams through bringing into focus the convergence of East-West poetics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032578422
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/26/2025
Series:	Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Zhanghui Yang is Associate Professor of American Literature at Yunnan Normal University in China. He earned his doctorate from the University of Macau in 2021. His main research areas are China and modernism, and literature and geography, with a special focus on the interaction of Chinese classical landscape poetry and landscape writing in American modernist poetry.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

 

Introduction

 

1. Williams’s Encounter with China and the Chinese Landscape Tradition

1.1  “the material I knew”: Williams’s Knowledge of China and Chinese Landscape tradition

1.2  Williams’s Early Engagement with Chinese Landscape Aesthetics: 1915-1923

1.3 Chinese Landscape Aesthetics in Williams’s Late Works

 

2. Chinese Landscape Tradition and Its Journey to the American Modernism

2.1       Chinese shanshui 山水 Tradition: An Introduction

2.2 Fenollosa: the Forerunner of Introducing Chinese Landscape Aesthetics

2.3 Pound: the Inheritor Carrying Forward the Legacy of Fenollosa

2.4 Convergence of Pound’s Imagist Aesthetics and Chinese Landscape Tradition

 

3. Inheritance and Innovation: Self and Landscape in Williams Poetry

3.1 “with the material I had, I was lyrical”: Landscape Aesthetics of the West and Williams’s Inheritance

3.2 The Lyrical Self in Williams’s Poetry and Prose

3.3 Self and Landscape in Chinese Landscape Discourse

3.4 Landscape with Self in Williams’s Early Poetry

4. The Chinese Interfusion of Emotion and Scene in Williams’s Landscape Writing

4.1 Williams’s Modernist Aesthetic Stance in His Poetry and Prose

4.2 The Interfusion of Emotion and Scene in Chinese Landscape Discourse

4.3 The Interfusion of Self and Landscape in Williams’s Poetry

5. Landscape and Seeing in Williams’s Poetry: A Chinese Perspective

5.1 “no ideas but in things” and the Idea of Seeing

5.2 Williams’s Blending of the Chinese Idea of Seeing into His Own Poetics 

5.3 Landscape and Seeing in Chinese Critical Discourse

5.4 Williams’s Experiment with the Idea of Seeing in Landscape Writing

6. Landscape and the Poetic Space in Williams’s Poetry

6.1 Landscape, Seeing, and Space: a Critical Review

6.2 The Space of Frustration in Paterson

6.3 The Space of Completion in Williams’s Landscape Writing

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Zhanghui Yang’s new book points a deep-focused lens at a hitherto, largely ignored relationship between Chinese landscape poetry and Modernism. While Pound’s indebtedness to the practice of Rihaku, Mei Sheng and others has already been explored intricately by scholars like Qian and Saussy, a full examination of the impress of Chinese landscape poetry on the work of William Carlos Williams is long overdue. Yang’s analysis is simultaneously deft and wide-ranging, as well as highly convincing, and marks a fresh and exciting beginning in Williams scholarship.

Matthew Gibson, Associate professor, University of Macau, China

Zhangui Yang’s monograph is a compelling reconceptualization of Williams’s engagement with Chinese culture. Through carefully targeted but adventurous scholarship on landscape aesthetics, Yang brings a fresh perspective to the venerable theme of place in Williams’s oeuvre. This tack sets the book apart from other important studies of Williams, and is supported by a wealth of contextual information on Chinese landscape tradition – as well as its complex intersections with Imagism and American modernist thought. In doing so, Yang helps connect crucial moments across the arc of William’s career where the poet’s relentless dialectics are illuminated by his intellectual encounters with China.

Eric White, Reader in American Literature, Oxford Brookes University, UK

From the Publisher