Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.2, 2019

The Vision of the “Century” and the Historical Starting-point of Chinese New Poetry—A Reexamination of Goddess

(Abstract)

Jiang Tao

Guo Moruo’s Goddess has been regarded in literary history as the starting point of Chinese new poetry. However, it had not been fully recognized by readers of later time for its wild style. In order to apprehend the pioneering significance of Goddess in the current context, it is necessary to situate Goddess in a larger theoretical vision in addition to returning to the historical context of the May Fourth Movement. In 1923, Wen Yiduo presented a comprehensive explication of Goddess in light of the twentieth-century Zeitgeist, which provided a framework that could sustain the rethinking of the starting-point of Chinese new poetry and the cultural-political implications of one-hundred-year Chinese new poetry as a whole.