Hardy Stewart

After completing his MA thesis at UC Berkeley on the Tang poet Meng Jiao 孟郊 (751–814), Hardy now asks how classical Chinese poetry traveled to and transformed in Taiwan before reshaping the island itself. His doctoral dissertation, “Peripheral Poetics: Hong Qisheng 洪棄生 (1866–1928) and Taiwan at the Edges of Empire,” asks questions about the experience of peripherality and the formation of local style at the turn of the century. It posits, in part, that the distance between the island Hong called home and the continent he called heartland—both a proverbial distance he studied and a physical distance he sailed—stamped the poet’s style with a particular attention to the fringe that then shaped his expression of provenance and the record of his world.