Historical imagination and cultural identity : revisiting Yang Mu's poetics of history

Abstract

This essay aims to examine one key dimension of Yang Mu's literary writings, namely, his "poetics of history." From 1968 to 2011, Yang Mu created approximately twenty-two poems on history at different stages of his life. This paper holds that, by invoking historical memory, Yang Mu not only offers his critical response to the polemics on modern Chinese poetry in 1970s Taiwan but also brilliantly conceives of two specific approaches and modes, namely, "observing and presenting history" and "reenacting and re-interpreting history." This paper argues that the second approach and mode, e.g., Yang Mu speaking through fictionalized and dramatized historical figures, should be viewed as Yang's insight, as it powerfully displays the originality and depth of the poet's vision. In addition, as the focus of Yang Mu's historical imagination shifts from Chinese mainland to Taiwan over the decades, his cultural identity undergoes a major transformation; in a sense, this shift results from the rise of Taiwan's nativization movement in the age of globalization.