Symbolism and Yeats Scholarship in China

Abstract

W. B. Yeats is one of the major foreign writers of the early twentieth century, who has lasting influence upon Chinese literature and is now a central object in Chinese literary research. China’s Yeats scholarship can be roughly divided into three phases―the May 4th Movement period through the 1940s; the 1980s; the period since the 1990s, through which symbolism is always a major topic. Pu Durong’s monograph W. B. Yeats’s Aesthetics of Symbols in Poetry (2006) forms a milestone in this field. Systematically sorting out the poet’s symbolist statements and offering a constructive exploration for the sources of symbolism and an inspiring analysis of the aesthetic mechanism of symbolism in his work, this monograph not only presents a summary of Chinese scholarship on Yeats’s symbolism but also proves to be a big step forward in the world Yeats scholarship.