1: The Rise of Oceanic Imagination in Song Poetry

In The Philosophy of History, Hegel famously contrasts Western societies with their “Asiatic” counterparts in their relationship to the sea. For Westerners, he argues, the sea evokes “the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and infinite,” and inspires them “to stretch beyond the limited.” By contrast, he claims that civilizations such as China lack this expansive sensibility: “this stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land is wanting.” For them, the sea serves merely as “the limit, the ceasing of the land,” and they maintain “no positive relation” to it. Rather than entering the broader debate over whether Chinese civilization was primarily land-based or included a meaningful maritime dimension, this paper narrows the question to one of literary sensibility: Did classical Chinese poets articulate a “positive relation” to the sea?
I argue that prior to the Southern Song period, their encounters with the sea rarely produced distinct themes, imagery, or emotional inflections. The sea typically functioned as a boundary or an obstacle rather than as a generative poetic presence. This dynamic began to shift in the early Southern Song, when poets started to aestheticize the sea. I substantiate this claim through comparative readings of selected works by Su Shi in the Northern Song and Yang Wanli and Lu You in the Southern Song. In addition to tracing the emergence of new literary modes of engaging with maritime experience, the paper explores the cultural and historical forces that enabled this transformation in poetic imagination.