Marianne Moore and China: Orientalism and a Writing of America

by Cynthia Stamy

Marianne Moore's poetry offers an extraordinarily rich site from which to analyze a tradition of American orientalism which focused upon China.  Marianne Moore and China  examines why she chose to participate in that tradition and analyses why her borrowing of Chinese models of all kinds—from poetry to painting and philosophy--was so critical to the formation of her verse. This book also examines the ways in which Chinese linguistic features provide Moore with models for her compound nouns and syntactical ellipses, and gathers evidence to show that her abiding concerns for precision, brevity and restraint have both Confucian and Puritan antecedents.

236 pages, Hardcover

First published March 9, 2000

Reviews

[Hao Guang Tse]

Surprising, insightful, extremely well-researched. Stamy makes a simple argument that Moore's poetic practice was greatly informed by Orientalizing techniques deployed to situate herself as an authority even as she refuses to expose her reliance on other authorities. This book has given me a goldmine of sources and thoughts for my own investigations into Moore.