1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910747001103321

Autore

Yang Zhiyi <1981->

Titolo

Poetry, history, memory : Wang Jingwei and China in dark times / / Zhiyi Yang

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ann Arbor, Michigan : , : University of Michigan Press, , 2023

©2023

ISBN

9780472903917

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xxiii, 326 pages : illustrations (some color))

Classificazione

HIS008000LIT000000LIT008010

Soggetti

Statesmen - China

China Politics and government 20th century

China History 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from eBook information screen..

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-311) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Contents -- Conventions -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Archives -- Timeline of Events -- Introduction: The War in Memory -- Part I. The End of Literati Politics --   1. The Revolutionary --   2. The Statesman --   3. The “Traitor” -- Part II. The Poetics of Memory --   4. Poetry as Mnemonic Atlas --   5. The Iconography of an Assassin --   6. The Impossibility of Remembering the Past at Nanjing -- Epilogue: Poetry against Oblivion -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Wang Jingwei, poet and politician, patriot and traitor, has always been a figure of major academic and popular interest. Until now, his story has never been properly told, let alone critically investigated. The significance of his biography is evident from an ongoing war on cultural memory: modern mainland China prohibits serious academic research on wartime collaboration in general, and on Wang Jingwei in particular. At this critical juncture, when the recollection of World War II is fading from living memory and transforming into historical memory, this knowledge embargo will undoubtedly affect how China remembers its anti-fascist role in WWII. In Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, Zhiyi Yang brings us a long overdue  reexamination of Wang's impact on cultural memory of WWII in China. In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful



dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang's lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and heavily influenced the public's posthumous memory of him. Drawing on archives (in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, France, and Germany), memoires, historical journals, newspapers, interviews, and other scholarly works, this book offers the first biography of Wang that addresses his political, literary, and personal life in a critical light and with sympathetic impartiality.