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This volume of fourteen essays explores Chinese poetic modernism in all its facets, from its origins in the 1920s through 21st century manifestations. Modernisms in the plural reflects the complexity of the ideas and forms which can be associated with this literary-historical term. The volume's contributors take a variety of focus points, from literary groups such as “9 Leaves” or “Bamboo Hat,” to individuals such as modernist sonneteer Feng Zhi 冯至, or Taiwan experimentalist Xia Yu 夏宇 (Hsia Yü), and Hong Kong modernist Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉钧, to non-biographically oriented chapters concerning modernist language, poetry and visual art, among other issues. Collectively, the volume endeavors to present as complete a picture of modernist practice in Chinese poetry as possible.

In A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune, Haosheng Yang provides an in-depth study of the classical-style poems of the most iconoclastic May Fourth Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, and Nie Gannu) and highlights the five literary masters'engagement with traditional lyricism as their critical response to the sociopolitical turbulence of twentieth-century China. This study challenges the bias against classical forms as allegedly outdated modes incapable of representing modern reality in current Chinese literary history. Yang's fascinating book positions modern Chinese literature's formalistic nonlinearity, representational experiences, and aspiration for a new voice through an old form as factors that are all crucial to exploring more fully the blurred boundary between the traditional and the modern.

In Fragmenting Modernisms, Carolyn FitzGerald traces the evolution of Chinese modernism during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45) and Chinese Civil War (1945-49) through a series of close readings of works of fiction, poetry, film, and visual art, produced in various locations throughout wartime China.Showing that the culture of this period was characterized by a high degree of formal looseness, she argues that such aesthetic fluidity was created in response to historical conditions of violence and widespread displacement. Moreover, she illustrates how the innovative formal experiments of uprooted writers and artists expanded the geographic and aesthetic boundaries of Chinese modernism far beyond the coastal cities of Shanghai and Beijing.