Books

Forthcoming

EUP

Poet-Painters and Intermedial Modernism

Bowen Wang

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (under contract).
MUP

Plural Artisthood: 20th-21st-Century Intermedial Reconfigurations

Bowen Wang, and Neil Murphy (eds.)

Manchester: Manchester University Press (positive reports received).
BA

Fictionality across Boundaries: Contexts, Contests, and Complex Effects

Mengchen Lang, and Bowen Wang (eds.)

New York: Bloomsbury Academic (under contract).

Special Issues

Forthcoming

Oriental Healing: Chinese Horizons for Western Crises

Natalia Morzhenkova, and Bowen Wang (eds.)

Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (confirmed).

2027

The Somaesthetics of Avant-Garde Fashion

Bowen Wang (ed.)

Literature Compass, vol. 24, 2027 (forthcoming).

2026

ELN

Global Transmedial Modernism

Bowen Wang (ed.)

English Language Notes, vol. 64, no. 2, 2026 (forthcoming).

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This special issue of English Language Notes invites contributions that examine the dynamic exchanges of literature and other nonliterary forms between Eastern and Western countries throughout the 20th century. Modernism, rather than being confined to regional or national categories, is characterized by its transcontinental, interdisciplinary agencies with different languages, cultures, and mediums intertwining. Far from being a Western-centric movement, modernism absorbed influences from around the globe, notably East Asia, where Japanese haikus, Chinese ideograms, and other artistic mediums took pivotal roles in reshaping avant-garde practices. This East-West dynamic has generated a transmedially-oriented aesthetic of formal spontaneousness, expressive essence, and spatial complexity that disrupts established conventions and redefines modernist poetics as cross-cultural and international. Recent scholarship by Zhaoming Qian, Ming Dong Gu, Yunte Huang, Steven Yao, and Christopher Bush, among others, has investigated the cosmopolitan interactions in the modernist era. Central to this special issue is the notion of transmediality—the confluence of literature with other artforms such as photography, music, visual art, cinema, and theatre—across the Pacific Rim. By exploring how Western and East-Asian traditions and innovations interacted with each other, the issue aims to unravel the collaborative energies that moved beyond colonialist or orientalist assumptions. What resulted was a broad spectrum of verbivocovisual experiments that opened new paths in reconsidering global modernisms/modernities.

2024

Intermedial Poetries: Alternative Methods and Practices

Bowen Wang, and Amelia McConville (eds.)

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 47, no. 2, 2024, 185 pages.

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The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed an intermedial dialogue between verbal and visual representations along with avant-garde art movements. Both literary and artistic historiography notice an alternative of ut pictura poesis in the notion of intermediality between poetry and visual art, especially since the experimentation of poets from Imagism and early modernism. Ezra Pound’s ideogram, Wyndham Lewis’s vortex, William Carlos Williams’s ekphrasis, Wallace Stevens’ art collection, as well as Gertrude Stein’s verbal portrayal, as well as show their shared interest in and inspiration from a formal or technical transformation of modern art, such as Futurism, Dada, Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, etc. Through the ongoing inventive confabulation between these various artforms, ranging from literature, painting, photography, theatre, cinema, and other media, modernist and contemporary poets choose to approach their medium via non-representational art and discard the mimetic principles so as to access a new model of poetic expression. Therefore, this special issue intends to explore the multiple manifestation of poetic experiments across different media, disciplines, and cultures. Intermedial poetry might refer to those specific generic crossovers in a highly refashionable manner: for example, ekphrasis, visual/graphic poetry, concrete poetry, illustration, photo poetry, cinematic poetry, poetic theatre, and so forth. Beyond visual influence or painterly effect, our collection of paper aims to offer a more broadened, encompassing view by casting lights on the spectatorship, aesthetic form as alter identity, and interdisciplinary consideration of contemporary art practices. It will try to answer these research questions in general: au fond, what is the difference between traditional textual poetics and the poetics of intermediality? How does the latter function and perform among distinctive modes of artforms or media? Moreover, how is intermediality as an actual agency devised to facilitate these communications across different domains, whether aesthetic, technological, or ideological?

Journal Articles

2027

"A sterile promontory": Archival Space and Late Modernist Dramaturgy in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Huayu Yang, and Bowen Wang

Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, vol. 49, 2027 (forthcoming).
"Sumptuous materials": Elsa Schiaparelli’s Wearable Artforms and Tactile Modernism (in Russian)

Bowen Wang, and Yunhan Gong

Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, no. 201, 2027 (forthcoming).

2026

ELN

A Polytempospatial Poetics of Modernism and Its Afterlives

Bowen Wang

Global Transmedial Modernism, special issue of English Language Notes, vol. 64, no. 2, 2026 (forthcoming).
ELN

The Transmediality of Global Modernisms

Bowen Wang

Global Transmedial Modernism, special issue of English Language Notes, vol. 64, no. 2, 2026 (forthcoming).
Empty Mediation: Contemporary Media Culture and the Failure of Affect in Leaving the Atocha Station and The Answers

Huayu Yang, and Bowen Wang

Anglia: Journal of English Philology, vol. 144, no. 1, 2026, pp. 1-19.

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This article examines how Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and Catherine Lacey’s The Answers (2017) – two contemporary American novels of the 2010s – reflect and interrogate the transformation of media culture in the context of hyper-industrial capitalism and its sociocultural impact on one’s identity and affect. Charting the commodification of artistic media and the ascendancy of techno-capitalist products, the study argues that these medial changes disrupt conventional modes of mediation and identification, culminating in the failure of affect. At the same time, the novels also gesture towards the symptomatic obsession with or fixation on affective experience as a compensatory response to this disruption, which further reflects the paradoxical entanglements of one’s identity, personal desire, and mediation in contemporary life.

2025

Vital Modernism: E. E. Cummings’s Still Life, the Quotidian, and Visceral Poetics

Bowen Wang

Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 48, no. 2, 2025, pp. 112-35.

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Among his intermedial enterprises, E. E. Cummings engaged with the genre of still life. Instead of displaying inanimate matters in a traditional manner, the poet-painter transfigured the physically motionless façade of everyday objects into a dynamic and visceral experience of (self-)vitalizing. His aesthetic representation of the quotidian conflates the material and the immaterial as a modernist craft of art-making that recreates a vibrating entanglement of the thingy form, its surroundings, and one’s attentive and meditative continuum. Through his verbal-visual experiments, Cummings overrides the distinction between the static and the motile, interiority and exteriority, and art and life, by foregrounding the intrinsic spirit of still life as an evolving desire to be encoded and reconfigured in varying senses and structures. His visceral poetics of reinstating liveness/liveliness from stillness thus provides the reader-viewers with an active way of dialoguing with the corporeal, affective, and imaginary realities that surround them.
On and Off the Canvas: William Carlos Williams’s Ekphrasis and Wallace Stevens’s Abstraction as Modernism’s Transmedial Artifice

Bowen Wang

Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 59, no. 4, 2025, pp. 256-94.

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This article examines how the transmedial synergy between verbal and visual forms reshaped aesthetic perception and cultural recognition in the early twentieth century, focusing on the non-literary elements in modernist poetries of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Both poets, associated with avant-garde movements, developed a self-awareness of the symbiotic relation between poetry and painting in their transmedial creations. For instance, Williams’s ekphrastic references to classical artworks and his collaboration with contemporaneous painters, along with Stevens’s philosophical reflections on a unified theory of art grounded in abstraction. By proposing the concept of modernist aesthetics of transmediality, this study critically investigates how their interartistic approaches challenge the longstanding debate between poesis and pictura at the peak of the Lessingian dichotomy. Furthermore, the article explores how verbal designs and compositions, enshrouded within visual culture and mass media, offer radical artifice for new strain of expression, mediation, and re-presentation that refract the medial complexities of modernity.
Modernism’s Contemporary Echoes: An Interview with Randall Stevenson

Bowen Wang, and Randall Stevenson

English Studies, vol. 106, no. 6, 2025, pp. 914-28.

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Bowen Wang interviewed Randall Stevenson on the evolving state of modernist literature and its far-reaching legacies across the twentieth century. Stevenson articulates modernism not merely as an experimental movement but as a sustained interrogation of sociocultural values of its historical moment. The conversation covers a broad spectrum of thematic and critical concerns, including modernism’s dialectical relation with modernity, war representations, gendered narratives, its intersection with new media, and the liminal position within the “intermodernist” transition from late modernism to postmodernism. Through this discussion, the interview reveals the complexities of modernism as both aesthetic and epistemological paradigm, and foregrounds its enduring significance in shaping the trajectory of twentieth-century English literature. It ultimately elicits a reconsideration of modernism’s iterative dialogues with contemporary artistic, historical, and cultural formations.

2024

Beyond Ideogrammic Method: Pacific Rim Modernism and the East-Asian Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings’ "Poempictoriality"

Bowen Wang

Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 57, no. 2, 2024 (forthcoming).
"A draughtsman of words": The Modernist Crafting of Prosodic Intermediality in E. E. Cummings’ Fauvist and Cubist Palettes

Bowen Wang

Modernist Cultures, vol. 19, no. 2-3, 2024, pp. 153-85.

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In the context of intermedial modernism, this article delves into the Fauvist and Cubist influences of Continental avant-gardes and their painterly crafts on E. E. Cummings’ early poems from the 1920s. During this ‘Francophile’ period in Paris encountering Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Cummings has cultivated a distinct modernist vision that transcends the national, cultural and medium-specific boundaries. His artistic experimentation entails the bold use of wild colours, abstract lines, analytic forms and typographical language. The core of this composite artistry resides in the prosodic intermediality as eccentric craftsmanship exhibited in his ‘poempictures.’ The poet-painter dedicated himself to a creative transfiguration of linguistic structures and graphic patterns, melding them into alternative modes of expression that reshape our perceptions, affections and multisensual experiences. In doing so, Cummings’ intermedial prosody envisions an idiosyncratically avant-garde palette to celebrate the vitality, dynamism and self-transcendence intrinsic to the pluralistic ethos of modernist aesthetics.
Intermedialising Modernities: The Polyphonism of Modernist Ut pictura poesis

Bowen Wang

Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 40, 2024, pp. 1-20.

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The early twentieth century ushered in an unprecedented era of intermedial convergence, where different art forms such as poesis and pictura began to confabulate with each other rather than competing in historically paragonal debates. A hallmark of modernist aesthetics is the shift towards the non-verbal mediums, with poets breaking away from outdated subjects and linguistic structures, and instead experimenting with the visual, material, and spatial incorporation from non-literary domains. Hence, this article proposes an alternative framework for understanding and reconceptualising modernism through intermediality. It develops the polyphonically dialogic poetics—based on four types of dialogues: referential, associative, programmatic, and self-reflexive—emphasising the interaction and re-unification between textuality and visuality. Concluding with this typology of modernist collaborations, the study illuminates the mutual agency of creators of the time and the sociocultural implications of their artefacts. By adopting a revisionary focus on intermediality as an act of dialogising, it critically reinterprets the mediation within modernist ut pictura poesis as fluid, multifarious, and synergetic.
“In the austere theatre of the Infinite”: Constructivist Abstraction as the Aesthetic Archetype in Mina Loy’s Ekphrases

Bowen Wang

ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 37, no. 1, 2024, pp. 70-77.

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Grounded on the recognizably formalist revolution of language and poetic word, Mina Loy never tends toward a minimalist or primitivist treatment of representation. Instead, she strives for a self-sufficient, autonomous abstract form. To be abstract is to realize a conceptually and materially dynamic network of creating, observing, and reflecting between the artisthood and the spectatorship. Thus, as seen in Loy’s painterly and sculptural ekphrases of Constantin Brancusi’s and Wyndham Lewis’ works, this interart possibility of constructivist abstraction allows the poet not just to create an abstract form considered in its pure essence. More radically, Loy is able to capture the constructive process in between, inspired by those avant-garde experimentations, by recasting the conventional form and material to imagine alternative expressions and modes of identity.
Introduction: Towards an Alternative Poetics of Intermediality

Bowen Wang, and Amelia McConville

Intermedial Poetries: Alternative Methods and Practices, special issue of Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 47, no. 2, 2024, pp. 1-7.

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2023

Poet as Poem: The Intermedial Staging of A. E. Housman in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love

Huayu Yang, and Bowen Wang

Orbis Litterarum, online print, 2023, pp. 1-18.

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Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997) offers the audience a dream-like voyage through the post-mortem reminiscences of the central character, A. E. Housman. The attempt to resurrect Housman, as the historical figure in real life, is suspended by the intertextual incorporation of Housman’s poems, the both fictive and enigmatically private voice of which opens up the illusory closure of biographically accurate dramatic characterisation. By fluidising and activating the subversive emotions contained in the formal patterns of the poetic text, the intermedial stage with the corporeality of its theatrical embodiment becomes a spatialised metaphor for the poetry as an open space that is inviting meaning to be projected onto it. The poetic and the theatrical, thus deterritorialised by their intermedial exchanges, interlace a dreamscape in which the nomadic search for the uncorrupted, unappropriated poet/poem continuum provides a transcendental empiricist reading of the ‘truth’ about Housman.

2022

Words as Readymade: Mina Loy’s Verbal Portraiture of “Gertrude Stein” and “Joyce’s Ulysses”

Bowen Wang

The Explicator, vol. 80, no. 1-2, 2022, pp. 53-59.

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Between 1919 and 1930, Mina Loy created a series of pictorial and poetic portraits of her artistic contemporaries: from pen-ink sketches such as Constantin Brancusi, Carl Van Vechten, Jules Pascin, Marianne Moore, to linguistically innovative verses like “‘Joyce’s Ulysses,” “Gertrude Stein,” “Nancy Cunard,” and a note “William Carlos Williams.” In interacting with avant-gardists of her time, Loy explored new patterns of expression as an alternative to literary and cultural conventions. This paper will thus investigate the use of readymade words in two of Loy’s artist-portrait poems depicting Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Her verbal portraits do not merely offer the reader a poetic profile of modernist artists and their formal experimentation. It will be demonstrated at the end of this paper that, by treating the word as readymade, Loy and her portrayed writers are able to articulate a different form of language that is more fluid, plastic, and performative.
The Materialisation of “torrential languages” within the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy, James Joyce, and Aesthetic Modernism

Bowen Wang

Prague Journal of English Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1-14.

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Modernist literature was obsessed with a metaphysical problem regarding the word. A series of formal and material experiments started to address the word’s self-referentiality and aesthetic autonomy, against the backdrop of a new sociocultural milieu in the early twentieth century. To discover how this materialisation of language explored the interplay of literary and artistic modernism, this paper will critically scrutinise Mina Loy’s and James Joyce’s radical reforms of writing and try to answer the following questions: how did Loy’s multifarious artisthood and poem-writing exchange, interact with, and reinforce each other? As both were closely associated with avant-garde art movements between Europe and America, how did Joyce influence Loy’s refashioning of “torrential languages” (LoLB 88) as a creative model of linguistic experimentation? How did their visual aesthetics and experimental poetics help to declare the independence of language and the shape of aesthetic modernism in a new historical epoch?
Mina Loy, Logopoeia, and The Alphabet that Builds Itself

Bowen Wang

The Modernist Review, issue 39, 4 April 2022.

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2021

Demystification of the “Innocent Eye”: Nelson Goodman, Ernst H. Gombrich, and the Limitation of Conventionalism

Bowen Wang

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 44, no. 1, 2021, pp. 81-88.

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Both literary and artistic historiography has been devoted to exploring the basic relationship between the real world and the work of art, from the mimetic theories of Plato and Aristotle to the contemporary theorists, i.e. Nelson Goodman and Ernst H. Gombrich. Their attempts to probe into the nature of pictorial representation mainly respond to two questions: What is the relationship between representation and that it is to represent (between picture and reality)? What is the mechanism of, or in an ontological sense, what is representation? Guided by these two questions, my article will critically investigate the models of Goodman’s and Gombrich’s representation theory on account of convention rather than resemblance, expression, or imitation.

Book Chapters

2026

Silence and Empowering: The Gendered Narrative of Modernism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Bowen Wang

Modernism Revisited: Texts and Contexts, edited by Amitayu Chakraborty, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026, pp. 97-106.

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In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the portrayal of women is not central to the fictional narrative; rather, their characteristic presence is eclipsed by male protagonists with their literary descriptions scant in comparison. Some have criticised Conrad for confining female characters to (con)textual sexism or patriarchism – marginalising their individual autonomy and silencing their expressive voices. Yet, reconsidering Conrad within the critical framework of modernist narration, this chapter aims to dispel the negative, passive depictions of his woman figures perpetuated by stereotypical interpretations in the past. By scrutinising the symbolic dynamics of feminine discourses and their gender politics in the novella, it will elucidate the emancipatory struggles of modern womanhood to assert both their literal and societal agency, which implicitly readdresses the “formidable silence” that permeates the storytelling, whether in retrospective narratives and actual realities.

2025

"The image of one fatal word": Transmedial Crisscrossings in E. E. Cummings’ Experimental Modernism

Bowen Wang

American Modernism (Re)Considered: Critical Essays, edited by Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, pp. 169-91.

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E. E. Cummings, a poet-painter from the twentieth-century American Parnassus, marks the dynamic exchange of multiple modalities that revitalize the cross-fertilization of modernist poetry and visual art. Especially noteworthy is his experimental approach to graphic writing, an innovative artistry that he coins “poempictures”. This chapter explores Cummings’ transmedial prowess of using color/line and letter/space, highlighting how he meticulously weaves together verbal-visual fractures to crisscross traditional artistic boundaries. By examining his unconventional techniques for transforming or synthesizing these mediums, the chapter invites a reevaluation of Cummings’ idiosyncratic acrobatics that grapple with the elements of materiality, experimental essence, and tangible concreteness in his poetic modernism. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dialectical relationship that exists between word and image, the temporal and the spatial, allowing the reader-viewer to contemplate the revolutionary potential of his composite artforms in that specific epoch. Ultimately, Cummings’ transmedial poetics of “poempicturality” serves as a testament to his modernist quest for freedom, individuality, and self-expression in response to the mechanization and alienation of the postwar modernity.

2023

Reformulating the Theory of Literary Intermediality: A Genealogy from Ut Pictura Poesis to Poststructuralist In-Betweenness

Bowen Wang

The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, edited by Jørgen Bruhn et al., Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 339-64.

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The Horatian dogma of ut pictura poesis positions itself at the interdisciplinary confluence not only of poetry and painting, but also, to a large extent, of rhetoric and aesthetics, epistemology and philosophy, cognition and other related social sciences. The theoretical discussion on the relationship of different media first emerged as a structural parallel that stressed kinship and harmony in Aristotelian poetics, and was then transformed into paragonal debates that emphasized difference and exceptionality during the Renaissance. Later, it arrived at an extreme delimitation of temporal and spatial arts, which deepened the historically empirical concern regarding philosophical and aesthetic fundamentals in the implications of binary opposition. Therefore, to sidestep the formal comparativity or time/space dichotomy as delineated from a genealogical approach, the notion of intermediality should be reformulated as a conceptual and ideological extension of ut pictura poesis. Its intermedial core shall be better understood on a theoretical basis of in-betweenness underpinned by a poststructuralist tendency. These both provide alternatives to the universality, radicalism, grand narrative, and fixed identity championed in the traditional literary and other art forms. Coming from the position of the in-between, intermediality has offered a series of new perspectives that transcend a limited point of view, cross the boundaries of stereotyped sections, decenter long-established authorities, link disconnected fragments, and search for revolutionary potentials. At the ultimate end, it creates a dynamic, fluid, and highly interactive communication that was scarce in the preexisting literary and art historiography.

2021

“Save this damn’d profession of writing”: Ezra Pound’s Images, Vortex, and Poetics of Intermediality

Bowen Wang

Music, Poetry and Language: Sound, Sight and Speech in Comparative and Creative Connection, edited by Konrad Gunesch, London: Interdisciplinary Discourses, 2021, pp. 249-262.

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Ezra Pound, a modernist experimentalist, executed his motto “make it new” by enriching poetry with inspiration from modern paintings. Bridging the realms of art history and literature, a practice of intermediality, he fulfilled his innovative promises and managed to establish a unique voice in early twentieth-century Parnassus. To some extent, he could be entitled as the central figure of the avant-gardist art movements, from London, Paris, to Rome, who worked as – in Wyndham Lewis’ word – a vortex in the whirlpool of Post-Impressionism, Imagism, Futurism, Cubism, and Vorticism, to consistently exercise and perfect his notion of primary pigment. The newly-emerging modernism, following the post-romantic fusion of different types of art, is concerned with an alternative frame, transcending the generic and formal boundaries assigned by the neoclassical aesthetic theory in the previous century to advance beyond the limitations of each medium. As an alternative to the constructivist aesthetics, Pound’s experimental poetics resorts to a complex, balanced network of the featured thematic or formal dimensions of poetry and visual art. The limitation of language, the crisis of representation, and the interdisciplinarity of aestheticism that influenced Pound and his poetics of beauty in the early years, thus render him conscious of the need of searching for a new vocabulary by translating the verbal into the visual. In this sense, Pound’s establishment of Imagism and then involvement in Vorticism in the post-impressionist context has shown his continuous efforts to separate from realist, naturalist conventions and create new forms and radical voices of the modernist aesthetics.

Translations

Forthcoming

Portraits: John Berger on Artists (in Chinese)

Bowen Wang (trans.)

By John Berger, Beijing: Imaginist (under contract).
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity (in Chinese)

Bowen Wang (trans.)

By Slavoj Žižek, Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press (under contract).