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2 results

  • 2 - Genre

  • from Part I - Ideas of the Poem
  • Edited by Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
    Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024, pp 34-48

  • Summary

    This chapter approaches genre both as a name for historically variable groupings of recurring patterns within poems and as an interpretive device that serves as a frame for engaging with individual poems. Examining Ezra Pound's translations of classical Chinese poetry, recent work by Marilyn Chin, and the anonymous body of verses in Chinese known collectively as “the Angel Island poems,” composed between 1910 and 1940 by detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, the chapter explores how genres acquire new features or traits as they travel across and take root in different languages and literary traditions. In this way, the chapter demonstrates how genres generate expectations and other affective attachments among readers. At the same time, the chapter argues, individual poems may partake of, depart from, and otherwise play with the conventions of multiple genres simultaneously.

  • 10 - Asian American Short Fiction and the Contingencies of Form, 1930s–1960s

  • from Part II - The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
  • Edited by Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Min Hyoung Song, Boston College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
    Published online:
    05 December 2015
    Print publication:
    01 December 2015, pp 187-202

  • Summary

    The critical nexus of materiality and writing affords a standpoint from which to examine the Angel Island poems: that of language politics. The Chinese written language has long been a source of fascination for Europeans, with much of that fascination deriving from what was (mis)understood as the pictorial or graphic basis of the construction of the written character. Taking up the foreign language aspect of the Angel Island poems, entails grappling with not only the semantic content of the language of the poems but also a history of Western responses to both the Chinese language and Chineseness. The Angel Island poems are currently on display at a restored Angel Island Immigration Station now designated a National Historic Landmark. Revisiting the Angel Island poems occasions questions about what the poems mean or signify and what different constituencies of readers need them to mean and signify at different historical moments.