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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
https://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/handle/140.119/140248
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| Title: | My＂Byron`s foot＂: Chou Meng-tieh`s Buddhist-Romantic Quest in Country of Solitude |
| Authors: | 許立欣
Hsu, Li-hsin |
| Contributors: | 英文系 |
| Keywords: | Chou Meng-tieh;quest narrative;Buddhism, Romanticism;post-war Taiwan poetry;transculturality |
| Date: | 2022-03 |
| Issue Date: | 2022-06-06 15:21:08 (UTC+8) |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the enmeshed Buddhist-Romantic quest narrative in the early poems of Chou Meng-tieh, an award-winning Taiwanese poet (1921-2014). While Chou is well-known for his Buddhist-Daoist sensibility and Eastern aesthetics, his first poetry collection, Country of Solitude (孤獨國), published in 1959, intermingles East and West, particularly Buddhism and Romanticism, in a spiritual quest that goes critically unrecognized. A sequence of four poems in this collection shows Chou`s preoccupation with a transcultural poetic journey-a Buddhist-Daoist-oriented and yet Western-minded, especially Romanticism-informed, aesthetic movement towards the frontier of his poetic vision. While resisting the ＂horizontal transplantation＂ of European modernist abstraction, Chou finds parallels between Eastern and Western figures who are disabled, overreaching, displaced, or rootless. The Romantic quest narrative, in particular, provides a motif of suffering for his perspective on transcendence, which supplements Chinese spiritual concepts. These poems show Chou practicing an alternative type of literary modernity by reworking the ＂Westering＂ narrative of progress and emancipation prevalent in Asian literary modernity and subtly relocating enlightenment in an in-between space in his Buddhist-Romantic quest, which seeks spiritual (as well as aesthetic) liberation through temporary identification with individual struggle in an East-West context. By examining the entangled transglobal imageries and stylistic choices in Chou`s poetics, this paper rethinks the ＂Easternness＂ of Chou`s poetry, and how his imagery of travel informs the circular, chiasmic, and porous nature of the East-West/West-East migration and transmission of thought at the brink of literary modernity in Taiwan. |
| Relation: | Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 48(1), 115-142 |
| Data Type: | article |
| DOI: | 10.6240/concentric.lit.202203_48(1).0005 |
| Appears in Collections: | [Department of English] Periodical Articles
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