“Mending the Sky” or “Forging a New Sun”?—Myth Rewriting and the May Fourth Predicament of “Disenchantment” in “Rebirth of the Goddesses”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16995973 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shun Yao (0000-0001-7120-8448, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, corresponding author), Qinghong Yin (0009-0006-2550-4100), YIN Qinghong (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 12 |
| Pages | 1514 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-29 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/rel16121514 |
| OpenAlex | W4416860229 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
Guo Moruo’s “Rebirth of the Goddesses” is among the landmark works of modern Chinese poetry. Its myth-rewriting amounts to an act of “disenchantment” carried out amid the ruins of “enchantment”. Yet this heroic undertaking is caught in a triple dialectical vortex: in order to disenchant, it must appeal to the primordial “energies” of myth (nature, life, imagination); in order for disenchantment to be effective, it strategically “uses enchantment” (by requisitioning textual canons and ritual authority); and in the end—because of the intensity of rewriting and the depth of political and spiritual investment—it becomes itself a new layer of enchantment (a cycle of re-enchantment). This exposes the core dilemma of China’s modernity project: to build a new order on the ruins of tradition is necessarily a tragic enterprise of rupture and continuity, of disenchantment and re-enchantment at once
Appeal · Dialectic · Dilemma · Disenchantment · Modernity · Rewriting · Chinese history and philosophy · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Poetry Analysis and Criticism
| Highly cited | No |
|---|