Literary Modernity and the Emancipation of Voice

Chapter 1 approaches the literary manifesto as an exemplary form of literary modernity, which writers all over the world used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to declare bold new conceptions of literature and aesthetics. It focuses on texts by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun, major writers whose critical sophistication and wide-ranging erudition have made their work sources of both literary influence and forces in ongoing legacies of cultural critique. While the chapter focuses on Shelley’s 1821 A Defence of Poetry and Lu Xun’s 1908 “On the Power of Mara Poetry” and “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” it refers also more widely to other of these authors’ writings that sustain and extend the preoccupation with the emancipatory power of poetic voice found in the aforementioned literary manifestoes.