This thesis examines the life and poetry of the woman poet Gu Taiqing (1799-1877) within the context of a community of gentry women in mid-nineteenth century Beijing. This group of women was a "community" in the sense that their contact, sociability, friendship and poetry writing were meaningfully intertwined in their lives. The thesis is divided into three interconnected chapters. Two separate biographical accounts of Gu Taiqing's life---one centered around the relationship with her husband, and the second around her relationship with her female friends---are reconstructed in the first chapter. This biographical chapter underlines the importance of situating Gu in the women's community to understand her life and poetry. The second is comprised of a reconstruction of this women's community, delineating its members and distinctive features. In the third chapter, a close-reading of Gu's poems in relation to the women's community focuses on the themes of xian (leisure), parting, and friendship. This chapter shows how each of these themes are represented by Gu and how her representations are closely related to the experiences of this women's group.

Korean calligraphy went through tremendous changes during the twentieth century, and Jung Hyun-bok (1909-1973), a gifted calligrapher, played an important role in bringing about these changes. This thesis focuses on one of Jung's most mature and refined works, "Using the Peak of the Five Elders as a Brush," owned by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. In addition to translating and explicating the poems on the screen, through a close examination of both the form and content of the work I explore how it reflects Jung's values, intentions, and background. This thesis also addresses the question of why some critics have classified Jung as a professional artist and considers some of the ways in which he actually cultivated and projected an image of himself as a traditional literatus.

This dissertation is a history of interpretation and interlinear commentary translation of the "Li Sao," an allegorical poem attributed to the late Warring States (475-221 BCE) poet Qu Yuan. I argue that the significance of the poem is an historically constituted and changing interpretation produced in a sequence of editions, and that insofar as translation is the necessary tool of Sinology, our scholarship and teaching should rest on a translation practice that visibly reflects the particularly Chinese material and reception histories of our texts. I analyze the rhetorical strategies by which specific interpreters, including Sima Qian, Wang Yi, Hong Xingzu, Zhu Xi, and Guo Moruo, "translate" the "Li Sao" through history, constructing personas of Qu Yuan that speak to the politics of their own respective eras. The last chapter is a new translation of the "Li Sao" based on my investigation of the poem's history. It contains multiple English renderings and diverse selections of historical commentary, presented in interlinear form, in order to facilitate historically critical understanding of the "Li Sao" and demonstrate the breadth of interpretation that it is possible to derive from the text. The translation offers not a single interpretation of the poem but rather an image of the historical dialogue that has produced and disputed it in interpretations from the Han dynasty to the present.

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The Crescent Moon School (新月派Xinyue pai) is a Chinese intellectual group that was active from 1923 to 1934. Its members include Xu Zhimo 徐志摩(1897-1931), Hu Shi 胡适 (1891-1962), Liang Shiqiu 梁实秋(1903-1987), Wen Yiduo 闻一多(1899-1946), Luo Longji 罗隆基(1896-1965), and many other Anglo-American educated scholars in the Republican era. Although the group was engaged in various activities, poetry was their primary concern and their most notable practice. This thesis intends to solve two problems: 1) what common values or core spirit guided the various cultural practices of the group? 2) what are the poetic features and underlying poetics of the group as a whole? To answer the two questions, this thesis firstly examines the core spirit of the group by reviewing their activities and historical development. It argues that underlying the various activities and facts, there was a core spirit shared by the group. This core spirit, which I refer to as the “modern conservative spirit”, reflected a unique understanding of modernity that was different from that of the May Fourth discourse. They understood modernity not as a negation of tradition, but as a critical synthesis and mutual conformity between the old and the new, the local and the global. I show how the Crescent Moon intellectuals acquired this core spirit, and how it was displayed in their various activities. Secondly, this thesis provides detailed textual analysis of several Crescent Moon poems and reconstructs their poetics. It argues that their poetics demonstrated three faces, i.e. a romantic temperament, a classic ideal, and a modern consciousness. The three faces coexisted throughout the poetic practice of the group, although a certain face might have dominated in a certain period. I demonstrate how the three faces were unified under the guidance of the modern conservative spirit, and I argue that the simultaneousness of the three faces embodied the modern conservative intellectuals’ pursuit of literary modernity. By discussing the core spirit and poetics of the Crescent Moon School, this thesis concludes that the group was a missing link in Republican modern conservative trend, linking the late 1910s and early 1920s neotraditionalist thinkers with the mid-1930s Beijing School writers. The modern conservative intellectuals represented a dissenting voice in the Republican era, but they were also committed pursuers of modernity and cosmopolitanism.

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The question of the relationship between modernity and poetic classicism has typically been investigated through the lens of classical-style poetry, which is to say, by examining poetry written in the modern period which adheres to existing poetic forms and eschews the European influences and free-verse style of New Poetry (xin shi). But as premodern poetry existed within a classical media ecology alongside calligraphy and painting, to understand the ways conventional poetry confronted modernity, this dissertation argues, we must also understand the way this media ecology was transformed, as well as how this constellation of modes shifted from a literati practice during imperial China to a modern, even revolutionary practice in the twentieth century. I argue that changing conceptions of the zi, or character, were central to this transformation, and to the production of poetic classicism in the modern period. I understand the zi as a material, visual, and theoretical site at which the temporal, political, and aesthetic properties of poetry are articulated, a site which transgresses the boundaries between calligraphic inscription, pictorial representation, and poetic utterance. Covering a wide variety of media, including underground literary journals, political cartoons, paintings, typography, and theatre, this study investigates the ways changing conceptions of the zi allowed writers, artists, poets, and politicians to adapt classical poetics to contemporary political concerns. At stake is more than an expanded--or even revisionist--history of twentieth-century Chinese poetry. Rather, by tracing processes of canon formation, dissolution, and rearticulation in a way that reveals the role of literature in crafting political sentiment, this project shows how so-called traditional culture has been leveraged in support—and critique—of Chinese nationalism today.

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