China's Second World of Poetry: The Sichuan Avant-Garde, 1982-1992

Abstract

China's Second World of Poetry remedies a deficiency in scholarship to date. In post-Mao China, types of poetry variously dubbed underground, unofficial, experimental, avant-garde, non-mainstream and so on have outshined texts produced by a state-sanctioned politico-cultural establishment that continues to pay lip service to maoist literary doctrine. For the 1980s and the early 1990s, most foreign-language scholarship has Beijing - and exile poetry scenes - as its focus, failing to do justice to other localities inside China, but outside the capital. Foremost among them is Sichuan Province, whose turbulent tradition is a core constituent of Chinese poetry from the 1980s, the 1990s and beyond. As for critical and commentarial discourse in Chinese, China's Second World of Poetry is a timely complement to a series of recent memoirs and scholarly monographs on mainland-Chinese underground and avant-garde scenes in various places throughout the country