The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang Periods.

• Author: SHIELDS, ANNA M.
• Position: Review

The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang Periods. By FUSHENG WU. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1998. Pp. 227. $23.95 (paper).

In his work on four Chinese poets of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang, Fusheng Wu aims to demonstrate the existence of a subcategory of Chinese poetry that he terms "decadent poetry." Since Wu borrows the term and, to some degree, the definition of "decadence" from the Western European tradition, the success of his argument depends on a solid construction of "decadence" as "a neutral critical term" (p. 1) and on a convincing presentation of the features of decadence as essential to his selected poets' work. However, although Wu shows himself to be a capable and sometimes insightful reader of Chinese poetry, he is never able to define "decadence" in the context of the Chinese poetic tradition such that it becomes a useful or descriptive critical tool, which means that his close readings do not cohere into a solid argument.

Wu attempts to reconstruct Western "decadence" (itself a socially and culturally situated phenomenon of late nineteenth-century Europe) ahistorically in the Chinese literary tradition as the term tuifei, but ultimately tuifei becomes irrelevant, since Wu grounds his definition of "decadent poetry" in the conventions of "Palace Style poetry" (gongti shi). According to Wu, Palace Style poetry's "project" was "a deliberate attempt to undermine the canonical concept of poetry by carefully separating the aesthetic quality and concerns of poetry from its social and political obligations" (p. 4). The chapters that make up the bulk of the book intend to demonstrate the following: first, the existence of a single, consistent "canonical concept of poetry" in the medieval period that advocated only poetry attentive to "social and moral obligations" (the thesis of chapter two); and second, a deliberate effort on the part of his four poets to write against this narrow view of poetry (chapters three through five, on Xiao Gang, Li He, Wen Tingyun, and Li Shangyin).

Wu's reading of the Chinese literary tradition in chapter two, "Decadence in the Chinese Poetic Tradition," pieces together bits of early literary discourse to construct a "canonical" view of poetry centered on the statement shi yan zhi, "poetry expresses one's will" (Wu's translation) from the Great Preface of the Book of Odes. Wu draws on both...