Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.3, 2018 

The “Beauty” in “Evil”: A Comparative Study of Shao Xunmei’s Floral Sin and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil

(Abstract)

Xu Wenying and Shi Zhongyi

Shao Xunmei was a noted poet in the 1930s, but his poetry anthology Floral Sin, modeled upon Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, has always been satirized. In general, decadence and freedom coexist in the presentation of artistic world of two works; in the presentation of freedom and beauty, they both boldly “turn inelegance into elegance”; they both show a free and unconventional spirit, and the integration of poetry and “I” in the pursuit of self. Both works explore the “beauty” of “evil” in artistic creation from a new perspective, revealing the unique aesthetic meaning of “ugliness.”