In her innovative study of the transformation of Chinese classical-style poetry in the early twentieth century, Shengqing Wu delves into the dynamics of history and form, and history and emotion, via the rhetorical medium of lyric poetry. Wu treats “modern” and “archaics” as mutually transformative and dynamically interacting categories and discusses two generations of “conservative” poets in this study: the generation born in the 1850s and 1860s, who reached intellectual maturity before the widespread introduction of Western learning; and the generation born in the 1880s or after, who were contemporaries of the New Culture Movement's players. Wu's major contribution to the field of Chinese literary and cultural studies, as far as this reviewer is concerned, lies in the following three aspects: her sensitive attention to the poetic form, her insights on gender politics, and her articulation of the sociology of literature, all in the context of continuity and innovation in the Chinese lyric tradition.

Wu carefully attends to the formal apparatus of poetry in the context of this study with emphases on its stylistic density, the genre of ci poetry, and translation as innovation. She proposes that “ornamental lyricism” is a kind of “embodied structure of feeling, through which shared perceptions, values, and lived experiences of the once dominant, now disintegrating class of Chinese literati were articulated” (p. 14).

Wu examines the intertwined relationship among historical experience, loss, and poetic representation in chapter 1. She argues that on the one hand, the lyric tradition and the stable poetic form provided a sense of continuity for Chinese poets who experienced traumatic historical events around the turn of the twentieth century. On the other, their difficulty in expressing their experiences resulted in an intensely allegorical mode and a stylistic density. For students and scholars of popular culture, Wu's analysis of the transformation of ci poetry during the early twentieth century is particularly insightful. The perceived low status of ci in the Chinese literary hierarchy paradoxically granted it “authenticity” and legitimacy in the institutionalization of the literary field at the time. This “low genre” was integrated into college curricula and used by both the old and the new camps of intellectuals as a carrier of “natural” (ziran) tastes and modern values.

In chapter 6, Wu focuses on the much-understudied phenomenon of translating Western poetry into classical Chinese poetry. Through close reading and critical contextual analysis, Wu enriches our understanding of the dynamism and creative energy unleashed in using classical Chinese to recreate Western poetry in the early twentieth century.

The Chinese lyric tradition that Wu seeks to reexamine has long been considered feminine. Many of the poems she deals with in her book did prominently foreground female figures as their most active rhetorical elements, testimony to the continued relevance of the feminine tradition in Chinese lyricism. Wu's unique contribution lies, however, in highlighting the “performance of gendered positions” (p. 93) in both male impersonation of the female voice and women writers' innovative participation in such a complex discourse. On the one hand, she treats the male writers' impersonations as strategies for transgression, and concludes that such acts made ci poetry “performatively feminine but politically masculine” (p. 269); on the other hand, she contends that women writers' participation in a discourse laden with passive and erotic female voices involved a double impersonation, and their impersonating the male impersonation of the female was often aided by geographical displacement and subsequent emancipation from habitual gender roles.

Wu's analysis of the case of Lü Bicheng substantiates her insights on the genre dynamics and gender politics in the transformation of Chinese lyric tradition in the early twentieth century. Lü's extensive international travels and her insistence on using Chinese classical poetry to convey her modern experience, according to Wu, evoked “a new imaginary of feminine difference” (p. 294) that complicated the compositions of both the “modern” and the “archaic.” Historiographically, Wu's analysis delineates the dynamic interactions between form and ideology within the Chinese lyric tradition, which was being constructed by May Fourth iconoclasts as monolithic at the time.

Wu's attention to the sociology of literature leads her to emphasize how the writing and circulation of poems led to the demarcation of intellectual communities. She uses the term “affective communities” (p. 167) to describe the formation of classical poetry clubs in the Republican era as an affective expression of and aesthetic response to the force of modernity. More importantly, because members of these clubs became increasingly involved in the new publishing industry and in the institutionalization of the literary profession, writing classical poetry became a social engagement and a politically charged public act.

Although aware of the personal and aesthetic linkages between the two generations of poets, and between the “conservative” and the “New Culture” groups, Wu at times, possibly unwittingly, reinforces their differences as conventionally perceived by their contemporaries and in literary history. Despite Wu's historicized use of theory throughout the book, she nonetheless cites Julia Kristeva as the person who coined the term “intertextuality,” and uses Culler, Plottel, Hinds, and Hebel to substantiate its relevance in highlighting the dynamic relationship between texts (p. 137), while neglecting to mention the key importance of the concept of huwen in the theory and practice of the Chinese literary tradition. That being said, Modern Archaics substantially revises our understanding of poetic writing and the modern literary canon in China. It is part of a larger move to excavate “alternative” traditions and practices in modern Chinese literature and culture. Students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture, especially its classical tradition and modern transformations, will benefit greatly from Wu's important contribution to the field of both classical and modern Chinese literary studies.