From “New versus Old” to “Nation”: The Historical Construction and Cultural Logic of the Modern Concept of “Chinese Poetry”

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_130How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Zhonghua poetry (中華詩歌); Chinese nation; Liang Qichao; National form; Multiethnic literary perspective; Poetics of community

Abstract

In traditional Chinese literature, “poetry” conventionally denoted verse composed in classical Chinese. In the early 20th century, Liang Qichao articulated the concept of the “Chinese nation”. This triggered a modern transformation for the term “Chinese poetry”. This transformation involved not merely terminological shifts but also conceptual expansion. The term increasingly came to include the poetic traditions of all ethnic groups within China. After the May Fourth Movement, the reform of Chinese poetry evolved. It moved beyond the dualisms of “China vs. the West” and “old vs. new.” Instead, it began to foreground questions of national character, ethnic expression, and cultural subjectivity. By the 1940s, debates precipitated over the “national form” of Chinese poetry. During this time, modern literary thought achieved a twofold breakthrough. Externally, it established the subjectivity of national culture. It also curbed the excesses of “Europeanization” in literary form. Internally, it reconstructed the concepts, categories, and expressive systems of Chinese poetry. This was done by incorporating the literary traditions, writers, and works of all ethnic groups into the category of “Zhonghua poetry “ (中華詩歌). This process laid the conceptual foundation for a “community” of modern and contemporary Chinese poets. Furthermore, it constructed the textual practices, theoretical discourse, and social value system of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry. This construction was viewed from the standpoint of the literature of the Chinese nation.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yuxin Li
AU  - Liren Zhang
AU  - Yanan Sun
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
TI  - From “New versus Old” to “Nation”: The Historical Construction and Cultural Logic of the Modern Concept of “Chinese Poetry”
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 12th International Conference on Digital Humanities and Frontiers in Social Sciences (DHFSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1218
EP  - 1227
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_130
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_130
ID  - Li2026
ER  -