The Sun King

Enter the visionary world of Haizi and discover the symbolic architecture behind one of the most ambitious projects in modern Chinese poetry.

The Sun King: Metaphors in Haizi's Grand Poetry is a wide-ranging work of literary criticism devoted to Haizi's theory and practice of "Grand Poetry." Through close reading, cultural history, comparative poetics, and philosophical interpretation, the book reveals how a network of recurring images gives shape to Haizi's poetic universe and to his search for a new creative self.

At the center of the study are two commanding figures: the Sun King and the Headless Warrior. Around them gather the elemental metaphors of water, earth, night, stone, sky, and fire. The author traces how these images express creation and destruction, love and sacrifice, historical violence and resistance, spiritual awakening and self-transformation. Haizi's poetry is read in conversation with Chinese myth and history, Buddhist thought, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, modern poetics, and postmodern irony-without losing sight of the intensity and strangeness of the poems themselves.

Part I reconstructs the genealogy, spiritual foundations, and literary theory of Haizi's Grand Poetry. Part II offers sustained interpretations of major works including River, The Land, Killing, Messiah, and the Sun-series poems, showing how individual texts participate in a larger metaphorical system. Together, the twenty-three chapters provide a substantial guide to Haizi's imagery, poetic philosophy, and place in twentieth-century Chinese literature.

Written for readers, students, and scholars of modern Chinese poetry, comparative literature, Asian literary studies, poetry and philosophy, and literary theory, The Sun King offers both an introduction to Haizi's imaginative world and a detailed critical framework for further study.