New from University of Washington Press–Heather Inwood’s Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes.

Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of “death,” poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China’s continued self-identity as a “nation of poetry” (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China’s media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule.

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