Journal Publications by Hsu Li-hsin
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2024
This essay studies Chen Li's poetry collection The Edge of the Island (2014) by examining his ima... more This essay studies Chen Li's poetry collection The Edge of the Island (2014) by examining his imagery of the island as a site of ecological crises, rethinking how his island poems, written over three decades, might be read in our age of Anthropocene emergencies. I look at several poems about ecological disasters written in the 1970s-1990s, seeing how Chen Li's work anticipates what Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King would call "big energy" poets in the Anthropocene-poets who "think climate changes" (13)-by placing his island aesthetics in the context of the Pacific region as a Cold War inflected, militarized, quake-and typhoon-stricken, and radiation polluted zone of ecological crises. Coinciding with the political isolation of Taiwan internationally and the intensification of industrialism and the establishment of nuclear power plants since the 1970s, the emergence of environmental activism in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the cross-strait military crisis and earthquakes in the 1990s, his island poems speak subtly to the connection between the Cold War and the Anthropocene narrative, disclosing the environmental urgency of our time for a less human-centric and more energy-aware mode of thinking and writing, where the earth system takes the place of the isolated island ecosystem to account for the poet's world consciousness. I explore the island as a site of planetary crises in poems by Chen Li, including "In a City Alarmed by a Series of Earthquakes"
Chung Wai Literary Quarterly, 2023
The essay looks at the connection between Chinese folklores and the Anthropocene, examining the t... more The essay looks at the connection between Chinese folklores and the Anthropocene, examining the tale of the silkworm girl in ancient Chinese mythologies and folklores from an Eco-Gothic perspective of humannonhuman alliance (as well as its betrayal). The process of sericultural development in Asia works in tandem with the formation of the renowned "silk road," an international commercial route for the exchange of goods and materials from East Asia, Central Asia to Europe and the Mediterranean region. The myth of the silkworm girl encapsulates such an eco-economic coexistence among human beings, animals, plants and matter in its most rudimentary form. My discussion focuses on the two versions of the story of the silkworm girl, one from an earlier collection of folklores The Sou shen ji (In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record) by a Jin Dynasty historian Gan Bao in China, and the other one from Du Guan Ting's Yong Cheng Ji Sian Lu (Records of the Assembled Transcents of the Fortified Walled City), a later collection of stories compiled in the Tang dynasty. The essay will compare the two representations of the silkworm girl, reconsidering the ecological significance of Chinese mythology in the age of our Anthropocene crisis.
Studies in American Fiction, 2023
The paper proposes to examine the entangled relationship between race and environment in nineteen... more The paper proposes to examine the entangled relationship between race and environment in nineteenth-century American literary tradition by looking at the gothic representation of the three vagabond characters in relation to Californian coastal landscape in Bret Harte’s “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900). Critically seen as a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Harte’s story continues the questioning of the civilization / wilderness dichotomy in Twain’s work, but the story complicates its racial-ecological dynamics by shifting the focus from a white boy and a black slave to a Chinese orphan, a Native American vagrant, and a dog, and relocating their tramping and foraging from the Mississippi river to the pine forest and marshland at the Pacific coast of a frontier town in California. Harte’s repositioning of racialized (as well as politicized) persecution at the western frontier articulates an EcoGothic allegory on a transcontinental (as well as transglobal) scale, in which a seemingly ordinary western settlement is turned from what Leo Marx considers a pastoral-industrial “middle landscape” into a liminal haunting (as well as hunting) ground. The paper examines how Harte’s account of Trinidad topographies reveals a multi-layered ecological space and a haunted Romantic landscape that unsettles environmental as well as social order, reflecting racialized political exclusions during the course of the nineteenth century through legalized policies, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1855 Vagrancy Act, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricting the spatial mobilities of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other minority groups. The paper will focus on the intersection among orientalism, settler colonialism and environmentalism, rethinking how the enmeshed race-environment relationship in Harte’s writing, informed by the social and political practices of westward expansionism and racial segregation of his time, might reveal a subtler process of ecological othering, unveiling the parasitical relationship between racial exploitation and environmental destruction.
SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English , 2022
Since the emergence of modernity, the perceived Eastern emphasis on the harmony betwee... more Since the emergence of modernity, the perceived Eastern emphasis on the harmony between humanity and nature has been profoundly challenged and reshaped by the processesof globalization, industrialization,and militarization. Asia,as a geo-poetic imaginary and a geo-politicallocus,projects both utopic imagination and dystopic anxiety. It jugglesbetweentropical paradise and over-populated mega-cities, philosophical serenity,and militarized bio-hazard zones. It boastsboth keen recyclers and key pollutersin the world. Landscapes by both non-Asian and Asian authorsabout or in Asiamagnify, problematize, andsometimes accelerate such disquieting and polarized projections. Recentpublications on Asian literatures and cultures haveofferednew ecological perspectives and insights, showing the necessityof addressing global environmental crises through more diversified and situatedmethodologies and perspectives.1Built upon previous scholarship, this special issue on EcoGothic Asia is one of the very first scholarly attempts to address the intimate connections between Asian landscapes and ecological consciousness through the dual lens of ecocriticism and the Gothic mode.
Ex-position, 2022
Proclaimed by Thomas Carlyle as the “Mechanical Age,” the nineteenth century saw a prevailing pre... more Proclaimed by Thomas Carlyle as the “Mechanical Age,” the nineteenth century saw a prevailing preoccupation with mechanical ingenuity and instrumental advancement in both the scientific and the literary worlds in Europe. This article examines a number of writings by Thomas De Quincey about human perception in the 1840s, exploring how they magnify the awkward and yet intimately entangled, symbi-otic relationship between technology and poetry. In essays like “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain” (1845) and “System of the Heavens Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” (1846), De Quincey embraces mechanical progress and its necessity in providing one with an una-dulterated access to cosmic reality. However, in a later essay, “The Po-etry of Pope” (1848), De Quincey would theorize the distinction be-tween scientific and aesthetic writing, prioritizing poetic imagination over scientific facts. The article examines De Quincey’s epistemological dualism in relation to mechanical precision and explores how these essays disclose a more nuanced reading of scientific invention and its close alliance with the mediating and duplicating power of literary representation. It shows how De Quincey’s writing speaks to the Ro-mantic longing for a convergence between empirical objectivity and spiritual transcendence by disquieting, or even dissolving, the mind-matter and human-machine dichotomies established in his cosmology. Furthermore, these essays utilize the notion of mechanic precision to make human perception accessible, manageable, and potentially reproducible, in order to claim a higher level of aesthetic potency.
The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2020
The Wenshan Review, 2019
This special issue, divided in two parts, aims to provide refreshing perspectives and new materia... more This special issue, divided in two parts, aims to provide refreshing perspectives and new materials on Scott's writings as well as his literary legacies across the globe. There are six essays and two book reviews included in the first part of our December issue, and four essays and one book review scheduled to be published as the second part of the special edition in our June issue next year. These critical investigations presented in the special issue intend to celebrate the bicentennial publication of Ivanhoe by rethinking the historical, linguistic, political as well as aesthetic significance of Scott's writings and legacies across space and time. As the first of its kind to be published in Chinese-speaking countries, the special issue also hopes to speak to a wider range of readers with diverse scholarly interests and cultural-lingual backgrounds. 2019 marked the 200 th anniversary of the first appearance of Ivanhoe in 1819. Completed in November of that year, it was published by Archibald Constable at Edinburgh on 20 December, and in London just over a week later. Ten thousand copies were sold in two weeks, and two hundred years later, the BBC have recently listed Ivanhoe as one of the most influential hundred novels in English. Its powerful themes about the effects of religious fanaticism, social and ethno-cultural division and the precarious nature of English national unity were relevant in the year of Shelley's "England in 1819" and remain so in that of Brexit. As with many of Scott's novels, the reconciliations at the end are undercut: in this case by the clear and chilling message, obliquely delivered, that there is no place for Jews in King Richard's England (it is possible that Rebecca was modelled on her namesake, Rebecca Gratz, the first Jewish female student in the US, whose name was referred to Scott by Washington Irving). Rebecca and her father must take refuge in Muslim Granada, Islam's last remaining foothold in Europe in the late twelfth century: in so doing, the conclusion of the novel seems to hint that King Richard's absence on the Third Crusade against the Muslims (during which he was responsible for massacres, as at Ayyadieh/Acre, where nearly 3000 Muslims were killed) was both an immoral absence and a struggle against a more tolerant foe. Scott would also have been aware that Richard's accession in 1189 and preparations to go on Crusade were marred by widespread violence against England's Jewish population, who were expelled from Richard's coronation, an event followed by massacres at the Old Jewry, Stamford, Bury St Edmunds, Lynn and York (on the night of the Shabbat before Passover, 16 March 1190) amid widespread attacks elsewhere. While Richard did not countenance these attacks, his absence on Crusade enabled them, and Scott makes it clear that there was reason for Jews not to trust to the king's return, a return which they had helped secure by having had a large share of his ransom extorted from them. Indeed in 1194
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2022
The paper explores the enmeshed Buddhist-Romantic quest narrative in the early poems of Chou Meng... more The paper explores the enmeshed Buddhist-Romantic quest narrative in the early poems of Chou Meng-tieh, an award-winning poet in Taiwan (1921-2014). While Chou is well-known for his Buddhist-Daoist sensibility and eastern aesthetics, his first poetry collection, Country of Solitude (孤獨國), published in 1959, intermingles East-West, particularly Buddhist-Romantic, spiritual quest not critically recognized. A sequence of four poems in this collection shows Chou’s pre-occupation with a transcultural poetic journey -- a Buddhist-Daoist-oriented and yet western-minded, especially Romanticism-informed, aesthetic movement towards the frontier of his poetic vision. While resisting the “horizontal transplantation” of European modernist abstraction, Chou finds parallels between eastern and western figures that are disabled, overreaching, displaced, or rootless. Romantic quest narrative, in particular, provides a motif of suffering for his perspective on transcendence which supplements Chinese spiritual concepts. Those poems show Chou practicing an alternative type of literary modernity by reworking the “westering” narrative of progress and emancipation prevalent in Asian literary modernity and subtly relocating enlightenment in an in-between space in his Buddhist-Romantic quest, which seeks spiritual (as well as aesthetic) liberation through temporary identification with individual struggle in an East-West context. By examining the entangled transglobal imageries and stylistic choices in Chou’s poetics, the paper rethinks the “easternness” of Chou’s poetry, and how his imagery of travel informs the circular, chiasmic and porous nature of the East-West / West-East migration and transmission of thought at the brink of literary modernity in Taiwan.
The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2021
This essay examines a number of western landscapes in Dickinson’s works in relation to the westwa... more This essay examines a number of western landscapes in Dickinson’s works in relation to the westward expansionism and settler colonialism of her time. It rethinks how Dickinson’s poems of the western sublime speak to a consistent geo-poetic imagination about moving westward as a national cultural thought experiment and a social-economic necessity, vacillating between industrial advancement and pastoral idealism, between utilitarianism and symbolism. The intricate connection between these enmeshed perceptions of the American West is manifested in a number of western scenarios, such as the sunset, the gold rush, and the prairies. The various western (or westward-moving) topographies gesture towards an expansionist enthusiasm for the pragmatic (as well as symbolic) value of the American West, yet not without acknowledging predicament, tension, and fracture. In particular, by comparing one prairie poem by Dickinson with William Cullen Bryant’s 1833 poem “The Prairies,” a poem informed by colonialistexpansionist ideology, the essay reveals how Dickinson’s westward-looking poetic production speaks to the concerted and yet conflicted cultural efforts of her time to both represent and to reimagine, to utilize and to aestheticize, to preserve and yet also to sanitize American place identity by manufacturing her own poetic wilderness.
Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020
The paper investigates the literary connections between nineteenth-century American poet Emily Di... more The paper investigates the literary connections between nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Yang Mu (1940-2020), an award-winning Taiwanese poet. As a fellow admirer of the Romantic poet John Keats like Dickinson, Yang Mu showed great enthusiasm for Dickinson, expressing his passion for her in a post-modernist poem “September 27th’s Emily Dickinson” in the early 1970s. Dickinson also sought literary guidance at the inception of her poetic career, writing to the then editor of The Atlantic Monthly Thomas W. Higginson, after reading his “Letter to a Young Contributor” in April 1862. Their works inform a shared investment between the two writers in their Keatsian aesthetics, concerns about poetic fame, and experimentation with poetic forms during times of surging national cultural sentiments. Recent scholarships by critics like Cristanne Miller, Roland Hagenbüchle, Paraic Finnerty, Paul Giles and Domhnall Mitchell, among many others, have placed Dickinson’s poetry squarely in a global context. In a similar vein, critics like Lawrence R. Smith, Michelle Yeh, Stephen Owen, Anthony C. Yu, and Lisa Lai-ming Wong also perceive Yang Mu as a world poet who practices biculturalism by blending eastern and western cultures. Building upon previous scholarships, the paper examines how Yang Mu plays a role of not only an admirer and a fellow poet, but also a surrogate mentor in “September 27th’s Emily Dickinson”, replacing Higginson’s editorial advice for and “surgical” treatment of Dickinson. Reversely, Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain Slant of light” (1862) illuminates how Yang Mu’s translation of this poem of Dickinson in The Completion of a Poem: Letters to Young Poets (1989) and his later four poems “Rays of the Searching sun” (1996) transplant Dickinson’s late-Romantic, proto-modernist poetic quest onto his own post-Romantic, postmodern poetics. This East-West literary resonance demonstrated in these poems reveals the “cosmopolitan” potentiality embraced by both poets, shedding light on the significance of placing the transmission, circulation and evolution of poetic dialogues in a transcultural context.
Romanticism , 2019
This essay investigates diverging transatlantic attitudes towards mechanisation in the mid-ninete... more This essay investigates diverging transatlantic attitudes towards mechanisation in the mid-nineteenth century by looking at the portrayals of steam engines in Anglo-American Romantic literary works by Wordsworth, Emerson, De Quincey and Dickinson. Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes how time and space are 'annihilated' with the speed of industrialization. Walter Benjamin, alternatively, indicates how the metaphoric dressing up of steam engines as living creatures was a retreat from industrialization and modernization. Those conflicting perceptions of what David Nye calls the 'technological sublime' became sources of joy as well as sorrow for these authors. The essay examines how the literary representations of transportation show various literary attempts to make sense of and rewrite the technological promise of the future into distinct aesthetic experiences of modernity. Their imaginative engagement with the railway showcases a genealogy of metaphorical as well as mechanic transportation that indicates an evolving process of Romantic thought across the Atlantic Ocean.
Forum, 2012
This paper investigates Dickinson's poetic subversion by looking at her poems of spiritual touris... more This paper investigates Dickinson's poetic subversion by looking at her poems of spiritual tourism, examining how these poems challenge the definition of sacredness. Although she seldom travelled, her writing frequently uses metaphors of tourism to account for religious uncertainty in a rapidly secularized and commercialized society. Her depiction of spiritual quest, in particular, deploys what William Stowe suggests as an empowering process in travel, which exposes the problematic nature of received belief systems. Her poems of tourism open up a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space, in which religious and social hierarchy can be questioned and restructured.
The Emily Dickinson Journal , 2016
This paper proposes to investigate Emily Dickinson’s transatlantic literary connection with Willi... more This paper proposes to investigate Emily Dickinson’s transatlantic literary connection with William Wordsworth. Her references to and appropriation of Wordsworth inform her critical understanding of the polarized reception of Wordsworth’s poetry and its potential impact on her own poetic experimentation. Dickinson’s role as a poetic heir of Wordsworth, particularly her relation to Romanticism, has been extensively explored. Critics such as Harold Bloom and Joanne Feit Diehl point out the antagonistic relationship between Dickinson and her male precursors. Robert Weisbuch and Inder Nath Kher, alternatively, see Dickinson’s quest poems as essentially Romantic. Scholars such as Margaret Homans consider Dickinson’s poems as deconstructing the binary structure embedded in the writings of her male precursors. More recently, critics such as Richard Gravil and Richard E. Brantley place Dickinson firmly in the literary tradition of Anglo-American Romanticism. This paper explores Dickinson’s engagement with Wordsworth further through her potential awareness of and response to Wordsworth’s mixed Anglo-American receptions. A number of Dickinson’s Wordsworthian allusions in her poems, such as daffodils, primroses, and the sunlight, borrow and appropriate images that Wordsworth’s poetry had made popular in the cultural consciousness. These poems of Dickinson conjure up the Wordsworthian imagery as objects of rare values or commodities, reflecting the polarized receptions of Wordsworth in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, Wordsworth’s “joyful” message of nature, which Arnold and his contemporaries considered most valuable, played a role in Dickinson’s experimentation with her own poetic voices in the 1850s and 1860s. The paper examines how Dickinson might have been aware of Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and how Wordsworth’s “joyful” nature poems are critically reviewed in the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American world. I then scrutinize a number of Dickinson’s poems about Wordsworthian nature in relation to Dickinson’s tentative adjustment of her poetic expression for a “frostier” style at the inception of her poetic career. The paper suggests that Dickinson’s subtle engagement with Wordsworth provides a glimpse of how she is concerned about the positioning of herself, a New England poet, in a mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary tradition.
The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2013
This essay investigates Emily Dickinson’s depictions of Asia by looking at the notion of material... more This essay investigates Emily Dickinson’s depictions of Asia by looking at the notion of material, especially narcotic, consumption in five of her poems. Although she rarely travelled, her Asiatic landscape oscillates between literary Orientalism, sensationalist reportage, and patriotic commentaries to account for the geopolitical contestation between Asia, Europe, and the United States. The relationship between the East and the West in the mid-nineteenth century was punctuated by several international encounters, such as the Anglo-Sino Opium Wars and Sino- American peace treaties. These poems of Asian representation, with their focus on the intricate relationship between possession and consumption, especially as seen through the Western employment of Asian workers and consumption of Asian material and cultural goods, reflect Dickinson’s deeper understanding of the transglobal interchange of her time. The paper looks at how her Boston Chinese Museum experience, in which opium consumption featured prominently, might have influenced Asiatic representation in her poems. It also examines the depictions of Chinese immigrants in the American West by Dickinson’s correspondents, such as Samuel Bowles and Helen Hunt Jackson, to see how they provide a fertile ground for Dickinson to conceive her Asiatic landscapes. By exploring how the social and cultural portrayals of Asia are adopted and appropriated in these poems, the essay suggests that they indicate Dickinson’s consistent engagement with an emerging consumer society in America that involved a transglobal circle of production and consumption, and her poems expose its problematic process that promoted international exchange but did not necessarily guarantee equality, progress or liberty. Furthermore, Dickinson’s positioning of the United States between the old worlds of Asia and Europe implies her early receptiveness to the patriotic discourses of her time, and her later, more reflective stance on United States culture. Her Asian “consumption” in these poems, particularly her association of Asia with consumerism and narcotic consumption, simultaneously evokes and unsettles the intended control of contemporary Orientalist discourses concerning the racial other.
Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2014
Cowrie:A Journal of Comparative Literature and Culture , 2015
This paper examines Dickinson's poetic engagement with Wordsworth with a particular focus on the ... more This paper examines Dickinson's poetic engagement with Wordsworth with a particular focus on the role Asia, particularly China, plays in Dickinson's transatlantic reception of Wordsworth. Dickinson's awareness of the death of Wordsworth's brother John in a lucrative opium trade with the East, and these two writers' respective representations of the oppressed Asiatic and African other, offer a glimpse of their geo-poetic and geo-political imagination across the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
Book Reviews by Hsu Li-hsin
ASLE-Taiwan Newsletter (Dec), Nov 30, 2022
Menely, Tobias. Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics. The U of Chicag... more Menely, Tobias. Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics. The U of Chicago P, 2021.托拜厄斯・梅內利(Tobias Menely)是生態人文界的新起之秀，目前於加 州大學戴維斯分校任教，其研究主要聚焦於十七至十九世紀之英國文學歷史傳統， 以及其與非人界(the nonhuman)以及氣候變遷之間的緊密關係。《氣候與世 界的形成:邁向地球歷史詩學》是梅內利的第二本書，此書立基於目前生態批評 中重要的物質轉向(the material turn)論述，主要探究從約翰・米爾頓 (John Milton)到浪漫主義(Romanticism)期間，英國自然或農事詩之敘事 與抒情傳統，強調各種詩歌形式的發展與地球歷史之間緊密的關係，並審視英國 詩歌傳統如何細微的紀錄與反映了當時工業革命與資本主義興起所產生的氣候轉 變。
Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2016
Books by Hsu Li-hsin
Pacific Gateways: English Literature and the Pacific Ocean, 1760–1914, 2023
The paper explores San Francisco Chinatown as a transpacific gateway by looking at Bret Harte’s s... more The paper explores San Francisco Chinatown as a transpacific gateway by looking at Bret Harte’s short story “Wan Lee, the Pagan” (1874). His adoption and appropriation of orientalist discourse, written at a time when the “Chinese question” was debated vehemently nationwide, shows San Francisco Chinatown as a porous and multi-layered space for transglobal (dis)connections, in which the intersection between the eastern and the western, the premodern and the industrialized, the fictional and the real, is simultaneously emerging and thwarted. By looking at Harte’s account, the paper proposes to rethink late-nineteenth-century San Francisco Chinatown in terms of its portal (dis)connectivity. Being emblematic and symptomatic of the transpacific (dis)connectedness in the 1870s, Harte’s account amplifies the portal functionality of Chinatown as a multi-layered structure of spatial configuration that exposes the internal fractures, suppression and subversion of racial conflict beyond a romantic, static, and horizontal façade of orientalist projection.
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Journal Publications by Hsu Li-hsin
Book Reviews by Hsu Li-hsin
Books by Hsu Li-hsin