China and the West

Edgar Allan Poe and China : general
Hao, Ruijuan : In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many Chinese translators and scholars engaged themselves in translating and commenting actively on Poe's works in a free academic atmosphere.
Some of Poe's works were highly admired and imitated for their ingenious narrative structure and the psychological impact on readers. Poe's humanistic touch of sadness and melancholy was shared by many of the Chinese writers who struggled for survival in the 'long and cold darkness'.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, Poe studies came to a halt and received very little attention from scholars and readers alike. The national literature was censored by the 'Marxist' guideline that served for 'class struggle' and the Communist Party's political propaganda. Poe's works were categorized into the 'school of decadence', for they strayed away from 'reality' and practiced an 'art's for art's sake' that corrupted people's morality and consciousness.
This gloomy situation did not end until the 1980s and the 1990s when many of Poe's works were re-translated and published by some of the most influential state-owned presses. From that time on, the acceptance and study of Poe's works entered into a brand-new era with a considerable quantity and quality of academic papers and theses examining all aspects of Poe’s achievement. Contemporary Chinese critics are eager to seek various lyrical connections, direct or indirect, between Poe and Chinese culture.
The ten most popular Chinese writers of horror stories admit in interviews that they have read Poe's short stories and consciously put Poe's composing philosophy into practice. The construction of “effect” in unity and the 'horror of the soul' have become the cornerstone of the Chinese writing philosophy. Poe's 'art for art's sake' and his pursuit of beauty dominates. The thematic subjects and the narrative techniques are the two main areas that the young generation has attempted to imitate. Death, regarded by Poe as the most melancholy of all topics, is pursued almost to exhaustion in nearly all the Chinese horror stories.
The direct borrowing of Poe's structural techniques is mainly represented through the construction of 'horror effect' and the application of first person narrative. Chinese horror stories learn more from Poe by situating the stories in times and places that errify. The borrowing of Poe's 'firs-person' narrative, is one of the most significant breaks that contemporary horror story writers have mad in modernizing Chinese traditional culture.
The immense popularity of Poe's horror stories with young Chinese writers is interpreted as reflecting the deepening fragmentation and alienation China feels because of its fast-paced modernization and the invasion of commercialization. The increasing pressure of competition exaserbates each individual's uncertainties about the future as well as increase the psychological tension that fear, anxiety and trauma cause. Poe's stories externalize this mental complexity and deeply touch the uneasy pulse of China's progress towards material wealth and affluence. On the other hand, horror stories also provide a temporary escape for individuals overwhelmed by such dramatic cultural change. Poe and the world he constructs attract a large number of Chinese readers who encourage the commercialization of horror stories and popular culture. These historical and cultural circumstances quickly build a bridge between Poe and the young generation of writers who share the pain of the times.
Documenting and interpreting similarities between Poe and ancient Chinese poets is a main field of research for contemporary Chinese Poe studies, although there are suspicions and accusations that they have stripped off the historical and cultural specificity of these poems in order to pursue a “misreading” and subsume Poe into Chinese literary tradition.

Sheng Ning ; Stauffer, Donald Barlow : Sheng Ning : Until 1949 Poe was regarded in China as one of the major nineteenth-century American writers. He was admired as the greates 19th-century American writer and as the founder of the short story and the precursor of aestheticism. His 'neurotic genre' was accepted by modern Chinese short story writers, who moved away from old conventions that merely presented a series of events to new experiments that employed psychological themes. Writers using abnormal psychological states were able to use veiled hints and indirection instead of writing directly, and readers could respond to these hints using their own imagination. Poe's theories on the musical qualities of poetry, on the suggestiveness and undercurrents in a poem and on the unity of effect were also of interest in the development of the New Chinese Poetry. Although the type of poetry that was influenced by Poe disappeared for almost forty years.
The general interest in Poe went into a decline in the 1930's, for several reasons. First, the New Literature Movement was from the start a socially-oriented cultural movement in China, aiming at eradi-cating feudalist ideology and bringing about radical social changes. As a result, realistic and naturalistic authors had a better chance of being popularized at that time. Second, most of the Chinese intellectuals, in the face of the social reality, had gone through a period of disillusionment and despair in the 1920's. They had lost faith in the old values, but had not yet acquired new beliefs. This momentary vacuum made it impossible for Poe's highly subjective, imaginary world to evoke a response in these readers. By the 1930's, this period of ideological wavering had, in the main, come to an end. The Communist Party of China, which was founded in 1921, had by this time become more mature, and had become the leading force of the New Culture Movement; meanwhile the split among the Chinese intellectuals became more and more apparent. In 1931, the Japanese invaded northeast China and a long period of national crisis began Chinese literature was deeply involved in these events; therefore the poets and writers had to take a more direct and utilitarian approach. Under such circumstances, Poe's works, which were detached from social reality, could be enjoyed only by a very small circle of readers who treated literature as a mere pastime. For the general reading public Poe was no longer of interest, and after the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan in 1937, translation and publication of Poe's works virtually stopped.
Poe is virtually unknown to the younger generation in China.
Poe's influence on modern Chinese short fiction was almost exclu-sively upon form, in three different ways. First of all, some of his well-known tales were used as models and their technical devices or structure were widely imitated. Second, there were elements of aes- theticism, symbolism and mysticism in his work which later influenced European writers of the late nineteenth century, such as the French Symbolists and the writers whom the Chinese considered 'neo-romantics'. This neo-romanticism was popular among Chinese writers in the 1920's. The third and most common kind of influence was his use of language, his use of certain kinds of emotional effects, and his psychological probing into men's minds.
Poe's influence on the Crescent Society school is limited to his ideas on formal structure and musical effects. His ideas on poetic form and on beauty had satisfied their aesthetic taste somewhat, but as a poet Poe was never regarded as a model for imitation, except by a very few decadent, symbolist poets. His theories on the musical qualities of poetry, on the suggestiveness and undercurrents in a poem, and on the unity of effect were also of interest in the development of the new Chinese poetry. Three writers were influenced by Poe : Chen Xianghe, Li Jianwu and Yu Dafu.