To Perceive and to Represent: A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Poetics of Nature Imagery (Asian Thought and Culture) - Hardcover

Xiaoshan Yang

9780820427539: To Perceive and to Represent: A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Poetics of Nature Imagery (Asian Thought and Culture)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820427535 ISBN 13: 9780820427539

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 1996

Drawing on classical Chinese poetics and English criticism from the eighteenth century to the Romantic period, this book is an intercultural study of the poetics of nature imagery. It addresses the two interrelated issues of mental perception and poetic representation of nature and pays special attention to theories of integrating natural imagery and human sentiment. By contextualizing several major premises covering a similar area of critical concern in two different traditions, it suggests the possibility of constructing a common poetics in a specifically demarcated area.

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About the Author:

The Author: Xiaoshan Yang is an assistant professor of Chinese at the University of Montana. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.

Review:

�Xiaoshan Yang achieves a deep comparative knowledge of classical Chinese and that 'swing' period of classical to romantic in English, illuminating both traditions, and reconstructing their internal logic of poetics, philosophy, and criticism. Here is a keen awareness of the practical production of literature as it informs and is informed by theories of literature that see it acting, in Coleridge's words, as 'the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man...the power of humanizing nature.'� (James Engell, Harvard University)
�Rather than generalizing from a few famous texts, Xiaoshan Yang offers a sophisticated and historically informed analysis of the theory of description in English literature, presented in conjunction with how traditional Chinese theorists posed and solved analogous problems. Rather than assuming universal categories, Dr. Yang shows us analogous processes of change, by which two historically disparate traditions become commensurate.� (Stephen Owen, Harvard University)

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