Photo Poetics

Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture

Photo Poetics
Shengqing Wu
RRP:
NZ$ 96.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 79.20
Paperback
h235 x 156mm - 384pg
17 Nov 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780231192217
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Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.
What happened when photography met Chinese poetry? What kind of creative energy was released by this encounter, not only in these two specific fields but also in literary expression, visual culture, and aesthetic experience generally? Thought-provoking answers to these and related questions are found in this highly original, erudite, and thoroughly researched book. A remarkable piece of scholarship. -- Wu Hung, author of Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China Photo Poetics presents an encyclopedic treatment of the development of Chinese photography as cultural history. Wu considers this new form of image-text as a cultural artifact and an "intermedial" work of art with close connections with classical Chinese painting and poetry. This book is a major achievement and a milestone in the study of photo poetics. -- Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 Photo Poetics is a magnificent pioneering work on the new technology of photography as it encountered indigenous Chinese visual and poetic aesthetics during the Republican era. Its sophisticated approach, comprehensive coverage, and interdisciplinary scholarship will strongly impact studies of comparative photography, intermedial and visual culture, and Chinese aesthetics. -- Grace Fong, author of Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China Photo Poetics excitingly addresses hitherto-unnoticed tensions between modern media and premodern form in early Chinese art photography. Shengqing Wu expertly applies China studies paradigms while engaging with scholarship on Chinese poetry, painting, and modernity. -- Yomi Braester, author of Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
Shengqing Wu is professor of Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937 (2013).
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780231192217
Published: 17 Nov 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 384

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