This seminar proposes a reexamination of Chinese New Poetry (xinshi 新诗) through its engagement with both classical Chinese literary traditions and global literary cultures. While xinshi has often been understood as a break from the classical past, recent scholarship increasingly demonstrates its complex negotiations with inherited poetic forms. We seek to move beyond the binary of “tradition versus modernity” by exploring how modern Chinese poets appropriated diverse literary resources in the making of modern poetry. We welcome contributions on Chinese poetry from the immediate post–May Fourth period to the contemporary era, tracing both continuities and transformations across more than a century of poetic practice.

We welcome papers examining the influence of classical Chinese poetics, including (but not limited to) poetic language, allusion (yong'dian 用典), rhyme and prosody, regulated verse, lyric and genre traditions. We also invite studies of xinshi's dialogue with foreign literary traditions, including British, French, German, Japanese, and other literatures, as well as questions of translation, adaptation, and circulation.

We particularly encourage interdisciplinary approaches that situate xinshi within broader aesthetic and intellectual contexts, including music and sound studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, media studies, book history, visual culture, and comparative poetics.