LITERATURE TRANSPLANTATION OF TYPOLOGY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF YUAN MEI’S AND G. R. DERZHAVIN’S NATURE POEMS

Abstract

The application of typology to linguistic research has obtained abundance production in China, Britain and the United States, but there are no examples of its application in Chinese and English literature studies, except for some cases of comparative literature studies in the Soviet Union. This paper compares the nature poems of Chinese poet Yuan Mei and Russian poet Derzhavin in the 18th century from three levels: concept, imagery and texture. From the conceptual level, Yuan Mei (the subjectivity) keeps close contact with nature (the objectivity) without the help of God as an intermediary, while Derzhavin creates the trinity of man, god and nature. From the level of imagery, Yuan Mei is fonder of static description, and Derzhavin is more interested in tracking the dynamic process of nature. From the textural level, the third person description of the objective “speaker” in Yuan Mei’s poems is more frequent, while the “speaker’s” participation in Derzhavin’s poems is more noticeable. This paper also describes a method of making a mesoscopic and macroscopic comparative study of different countries’ literature by means of typology.