Wang Kuo Wei

In this first full-fledged intellectual biography of the brilliant and multifaceted Chinese scholar Wang Kuo-wei (1877-1927), Joey Bonner throws important new light on the range and course of ideas in early twentieth-century China. Coincidentally, she illuminates the nature of Wang's intimate, thirty-year personal and professional association with the well-known Chinese scholar Lo Chen-y (1866-1940) and provides a most comprehensive and compelling account of her biographee's posthumously controversial career in the years following the 1911 Revolution. Pursuing her subject across the whole spectrum of his many scholarly interests, Bonner critically examines Wang's essays on German philosophy and philosophical aesthetics; his poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory; and his works on ancient Chinese history, particularly of the Shang dynasty. Insightfully relating his strenuous intellectual search in the fields of philosophy, literature, and history to his very personal quest for truth, beauty, and virtue, Bonner shows in this finely crafted book how Wang's unhappiness in later life as well as his suicide can be understood only within the context of his humanistic concerns in general and his extreme commitment in the postimperial period to the Confucian ethicoreligious tradition in particular. Without compromising the clearheaded critical detachment that characterizes her analysis of the intricacies of his thought, Bonner has produced a portrait of Wang Kuo-wei suffused with warmth and sympathetic respect.

In the first decade of the twentieth century while other intellectuals were concerned with translating works of political and scientific import into Chinese, Wang Kuo-wei (1877-1927) looked to Western philosophy to find answers to the fundamental questions of human life. He was the first Chinese to translate Schopenhauer and Nietzsche into Chinese and to apply their views of aesthetics to Chinese literature. The influence of their concepts of genius and the sublime can easily be seen in his J en-chien tz'u-hua 人間詞話. Wang was also indebted to Chinese critics for the development of his theories regarding the sphere of individuality that each poem represents (ching-chieh), a theory that places him among the ranks of China's greatest literary critics. Innovative as he was in his concepts of poetry, however, Wang chose to convey those concepts in the traditional form of poetic criticism, the tz'u-hua, or "talks on poetry." Thus this translation of the complete edition of his Jen-chien tz'u-hua not only adds to the Westerner's knowledge of Chinese literary criticism but also provides insight into the way in which Chinese communicated with each other about their literature.