Year

1999

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (2)

Mentioned People (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (8)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1903-2000	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.	Document: Sheng, Ning ; Stauffer, Donald Barlow. Poe in China. In : Poe abroad : influence, reputation, affinities. Ed. by Lois Davis Vines. (Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, 1999). (Poe4, Publication) Document: Hao, Ruijuan. Edgar Allan Poe in contemporary China. In : The Edgar Allan Poe review ; vol. 10, no 3 (2009). http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41506373.pdf?acceptTC=true. (Poe2, Publication) Person: Poe, Edgar Allan
2	1903-1938	Lu Xun and Edgar Allan Poe Lu Xun's knowledge of Poe is by no means limited to The gold bug, however. In one of his early essays, he remarked that "The black cat in Edgar Allan Poe's tale is really horrible". Later, in an introduction to Mark Twain's Eve's diary, he made a judicious comparison between Twain and other nineteenth-century American writers : Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman. He pointed out that Twain was outwardly a humorist, but inwardly a misanthrope, although Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman did not, like Twain, "think in one way, but behave in another". He also noticed that American writers before the Civil War could easily keep their individualist features, but after the Civil War they had to adapt themselves to the social requirements of a highly developed capitalist system. These remarks show that Lu Xun had read and understood Poe ; in later years in one of his talks with an American friend he admitted that in his early years he had been influenced by Poe.	Person: Lu, Xun Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Twain, Mark
3	1905	Zhou, Zuoren. Zhi tang hui xang lu. [Tagebuch]. The diary of the Yisi lunar year [1905] records something of my translation of tales, which include The tale of Ali Baba and The forty thieves and The gold bug by Allan Poe....The general heading is The study of English literature. There are four or five books altogether, one of which is a long poem by Longfellow, as I now remember. All of these books were sent by Lu Xun. ....Yisi Lunar year, the first month, the fourteenth day, "Finished the translation of American Poe's tale The kidd drawing (The gold bug), about eighteen thousand words". I sent it to Ding Chuwo, and received Chuwo's return letter on the fourth day, the second month, in which he promised me a remuneration of fifty copies after it was published. ....The twenty-ninth day, "Received Chuwo's letter of the twenty-sixth, saying that The kidd drawing had been sent to the printers, and its name had been changed to Yu chong xuan (The story of a jade bug).	Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Zhou, Zuoren
4	1920	[Poe, Edgar Allan]. Xie mi de xin. The tell-tale heart [ID D34933]. In his introduction Shen Yanbing declares that Poe is famous for his mysticism. "Poe distinguished himself by his idiosyncratic style among his contemporaries. He was entirely different from the general public in taste. His works – short stories in particular – are mostly visionary and unearthly things, which, however, are also those things that will impinge upon our souls from time to time".	Person: Mao, Dun Person: Poe, Edgar Allan
5	1920	Hu, Xiansu. [The latest tendency in European-American modern literature] [ID D34934]. "Poe is a famours short story writer. It is Poe who made the short story a literary form. His writing techniques have been followed by the later short story writers. And his influence is particularly felt in the French short stories".	Person: Hu, Xiansu Person: Poe, Edgar Allan
6	1922	Xie, Luyi. [Evolution of Western fiction]. [ID D34935]. "Allan Poe is a very important writer in the early period of American literary history. The style of his fiction has its influence in western Europe. It can well be said that he originated the short story".	Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Xie, Luyi
7	1925	Chen, Weimo. Edgar Allan Poe's fiction. In : Special issue of the Sunken Bell Society = Chen zhong she [ID D34942]. This review differs from early criticism in its conscientious study of all Poe's tales. It is divided into four parts : the development of critical opinion about Poe; Poe's mysticism and terror ; Poe's aesthetic principles; and Poe's influence abroad. According to Chen, Poe's art is 'conscious art', and 'his works are also a record of his own experience', which is nothing like the experience of ordinary people, but 'the extraordinary experience of horror and mystery'. Chen believes that Poe builds up 'a world of his own', in which his imagination was always lingering on death and tombs and the supernatural. On Poe's aesthetic views Chen Wei-mo writes that 'Poe is in pursuit of beauty', and his beauty is inseparable from strangeness on proportion. As a result, Chen believes one can hardly find anything resembling real life, except in 'X-ing a Paragrab' and a few others, in which there is a faint satire of reality. Likewise, 'most of the characters in Poe's tales are illusory'.	Person: Poe, Edgar Allan
8	1928	Ren, Qiu. [The art of short fiction]. [ID D34945]. Account of the growth of short fiction beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, in the course of which various aspects of Poe's theories on short fiction are closely examined in raltion to his best-known tales. Ren suggests that Poe's tales are intended to three kinds of "narrative effects" : "the effect of action, the effect of character, and the effect of environment".	Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Ren, Qiu

Sources (7)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	1920	Hu, Xiansu. [The latest tendency in European-American modern literature]. In : Dong fang za zhi ; vol. 17 (1920).	Publication / Poe7	Person: Hu, Xiansu Person: Poe, Edgar Allan
2	1922	Xie, Luyi. [Evolution of Western fiction]. In : Xiao shuo yue bao ; vol. 13 (1922).	Publication / Poe8	Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Xie, Luyi
3	1923	[Poe, Edgar Allan]. [Hei ya yi yun]. In : Wen xue zhou kan ; no 100 (1923). Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. The raven. In : Evening mirror ; 29 Jan. (1845). 黑鴉疑雲	Publication / Poe9
4	1924	[Poe, Edgar Allan]. [The bells]. Zhan Baifu yi. In : Chuang zao yue kan ; vol. 45 (1924). Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. The bells. In : Sartain's union magazine ; Nov. (1849).	Publication / Poe11	Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Zhan, Baifu
5	1925	[Poe, Edgar Allan]. [Annabel Lee ; The bells]. In : Wen xue zhou kan ; no 17 (1925). Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. Annabel Lee. In : New York daily tribune ; 9 Oct. (1849). The bells. In : Sartain's union magazine ; Nov. (1849).	Publication / Poe14
6	1925	Special issue of the Sunken Bell Society = Chen zhong she. Devoted to Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann. (1925). [Enthält] : Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. Ligeia. (South Bend, Ind. : Virginia Tech, 1838). Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. Eleonora. In : The gift (1842). Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. The black cat. In : The Saturday Evening Post ; Aug. 19 (1843). Transl. by Chen Weimo. Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. The bells. In : Sartain's union magazine ; Nov. (1849). Übersetzung von Poe, Edgar Allan. The raven. In : Evening mirror ; 29 Jan. (1845). Transl. by Yang Hui. Chen, Weimo. Edgar Allan Poe's fiction. 沉钟社	Publication / Poe15	Person: Chen, Weimo Person: Hoffmann, E.T.A. Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Yang, Hui
7	1928	Ren, Qiu. [The art of short fiction]. Chen bao fu kan ; nos 2168-2171 (1928).	Publication / Poe18	Person: Poe, Edgar Allan Person: Ren, Qiu

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1		Zentralbibliothek Zürich	Organisation / ZB