In recent decades, unlimited by the vision of literary history, the studies of late Qing "Poetry Revolution" have explored cultural issues of modernity and geopolitics. In this line, this thesis aims to interpret the "Poetry Revolution" in the historical contexts of national imagination, mass media, and locality, with an emphasis on the function of newspaper and journal, whose influences of the "imagined communities" were beyond regional areas....[ Read more ]

In recent decades, unlimited by the vision of literary history, the studies of late Qing "Poetry Revolution" have explored cultural issues of modernity and geopolitics. In this line, this thesis aims to interpret the "Poetry Revolution" in the historical contexts of national imagination, mass media, and locality, with an emphasis on the function of newspaper and journal, whose influences of the "imagined communities" were beyond regional areas.

This thesis focuses on a poetic group in South China, whose participation in the "Poetry Revolution" has rarely drawn scholarly attention. Largely based on the source materials from Tiannan xinbao, the local newspaper in Singapore, this thesis reconstructed how the Southern poets led by Qiu Huiyuan played an important role in the "Poetry Revolution" through the public poetic forum in the newspaper, which interacted with that of Qingyi bao, the journal created by Liang Qichao and other reformist in Japan. A comparative analysis of politics and aesthetics between the Southern and reformist poetic groups will open a full vista of the "Poetry Revolution" and enrich our understanding of its historical significance.

In analysis, the complexity in the Southern poets is revealed. Different from traditional poetic group, they were largely shaped by communicating each other through the newspaper, characteristic of national imagination in the modern era. They were politically devoted to the reform agenda, yet at the same time they were culturally nostalgic for poetic tradition and literati's life style in the past.