Yi Zheng is Senior Research Fellow at the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. Her single-authored book publications include From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature (2011) and Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middle Class Civility (2011) and she has published recently, with S. H. Donald, the articles "A Taste of Class: Manuals for Becoming Woman" in positions: east asia cultures critique (2009) and "Chinese Modernisms" in the Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010).

Acknowledgments
Introduction to From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature
Chapter One: Envisioning a Culture of the Sublime Aesthetic
Chapter Two: The Imperative of the Romantic Aesthetic and Burke's Inquiry into the Sublime
Chapter Three: Wordsworth's Poetic Prelude to Modern History
Chapter Four: The Construction of the Sublime as an Aesthetic Movement across Time and Place
Chapter Five: Guo Moruo and the Reformation of Modern Chinese Poetry in a Sublime Poetics
Chapter Six: Rewriting Qu Yuan and towards a Sublime Denouement
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

This volume presents a historical-textual study about transformations of the aesthetics of the sublime-the literary and aesthetic quality of greatness under duress -from early English Romanticism to the New Poetry Movement in twentieth-century China. Zheng sets up the former and the latter as distinct but historically analogous moments and argues that both the European Romantic reinvention of the sublime and its later Chinese transformation represent cultural movements built on the excessive and capacious nature of the sublime to counter their shared sense of historical crisis. The author further postulates through a critical analysis of Edmund Burke's Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, William Wordsworth's Prelude, and Guo Moruo's experimental poem "Fenghuang Niepan" ("Nirvana of the Phoenix") and verse drama Qu Yuan that these aesthetic practices of modernity suggest a deliberate historical hyperbolization of literary agency. Such an agency is in turn constructed imaginatively and affectively as a means to redress different cultures' traumatic encounter with modernity. The volume will be of interest to scholars including graduate students of Romanticism, philosophy, history, English literature, Chinese literature, comparative literature, and (comparative) cultural studies.