Abstract
This essay explores William Empson’s pedagogical role in wartime China in the 1930s, contextualizing it in the nationalistic discourse of the wartime university and the turbulent political history of modern Chinese poetry. Jin shows how Empson’s modernist course at Lianda, the refugee university, inspired a local wartime poetics that at once rejected literary Romanticism while retaining a romantic quality of nationalistic passion. The article then explores the romanticized poetic celebration of Empson himself as a scholar-hero whose role merged with the salvationist and humanist missions of the university. Such evocation of Empson as part of Lianda’s heroic and humanist legacy took on further symbolic significance in the post-Mao 1970s, and still serves as an eloquent illustration of Romanticism’s varying forms of transmission in an Asian context.
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Jin, L. (2019). On William Empson’s Romantic Legacy in China. In: Watson, A., Williams, L. (eds) British Romanticism in Asia. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_5
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