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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.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Refashioning the Self
1. Multiplying the Self: Staging Fantasies and Cultural Personas
2. Envoicing the Paper Mirror: Autobiographical Moments
Part II: Emotions in Transit
3. The Social Life of Emotions: Photography and the Singularity of the Gift
4. Summoning Zhenzhen: Circulation of the Tropes of the Beauty, the Skull, and the Nude
Part III: Worldly and Otherworldly Visions
5. In Search of Soul: Psychical Studies and Spirit Photography
6. The Shadows of Poetry: Mediating “Interior Landscapes”
7. Inscribing Remembrance: Lyrical and Technological Envisioning of the Past
Epilogue
Notes
Index
About the author
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).
Summary
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.
Additional text
[This book has] tremendous value in shaping our understanding of how photography was perceived and used by the Chinese literati class in the late Qing and early Republican era . . . the book will serve as a useful encyclopedia and touchstone, inspiring further research.
