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Abstract

Inspired by the opposing views of emotion held by William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot, this article establishes a new theoretical framework for examining the Chinese lyrical tradition, one that is grounded in emotion's interrelations with events, belletristic texts, and authorial disposition. Following the turn toward a positive review of emotion during the Han, a political event-oriented view of emotion emerged, as explicitly articulated in the “Preface to the Book of Poetry.” During the ensuing Six Dynasties period, emotion was reconceptualized as that of which refined literature is constituted. Critical attention was turned to the interaction of emotion with images and words in the process of literary creation. During the Tang dynasty, Bai Juyi engineered an integration of the Han politically focused view and the Six Dynasties belletristically focused views of emotion. While employing poetry as a means of political and social criticism, he took delight in composing works primarily for the sake of aesthetic pleasure. With the Song and Yuan critics, the author's disposition, often interpreted in moralistic terms, became the new focus of expositions on emotion. Taken together as a whole, expositions on emotion in traditional Chinese poetics attest to a highly coherent system of literary thought on emotion, characterized by the sharing of the common denominator of expressionism as well as the divergent emphasis on politics, aesthetics, and morality. As this system of literary thought continued to evolve over the millennia, it seems appropriate to regard it as a lyrical tradition in its own right.

Keywords

Expositions on emotion; emotion and political events; emotion and belle lettres; emotion and the authorial disposition; lyrical tradition

First Page

137

Last Page

145

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