On the Horizon of World Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Sun
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Familiar Essay ◽  
Literary Histories

This book compares Romantic England and Republican China as asynchronous moments of incipient literary modernity in different lifeworlds. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. The book examines select literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms-of-life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts analyzed explore by literary means the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds and ongoing traditions. Authors studied include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang. This book contributes to the fields of comparative literature, British Romanticism, and modern Chinese literature.

Literary Translation and Modern Chinese Literature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
JI Jin
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Cultural Alterity

Since the late Qing, literature in translation and modern Chinese literature have maintained a symbiotic relationship. Translation, understood as an entirely new means of creation and expression rather than a mere change in language, profoundly influenced modern Chinese literature with regard to narrative structures and techniques as well as generic and formal innovations. Literature in translation can be considered from the dual perspectives of cultural alterity and sameness; even as the process of translation was influenced by modern literature, translation played an important role in the development of modern Chinese literature. To regard literature in translation as an integral part of modern Chinese literature challenges how we define the “Chineseness” of Chinese literature. It allows for a new understanding of the dialectic relationship between literature in translation and modern Chinese literature in the broader context of world literature and thus opens up new possibilities for literary creation.

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. By David Der-Wei Wang. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 402 pp. ISBN 0-520-23140-6.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 439-441
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Revolutionary Literature

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

Chinese Translation: A Vehicle of Cultural Influence

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 488-499
Author(s):  
Eileen Chang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Information Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
Zhang Ailing ◽  
Communist Revolution

Translation played a central role in the life of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-95). One of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century Chinese literature, Chang also wrote extensively in English throughout her career, which began in the early 1940s in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. She achieved fame quickly but fell into obscurity after the war ended in 1945. Chang stayed in Shanghai through the 1949 Communist revolution and in 1952 moved to Hong Kong, where she worked as a freelance translator and writer for the United States Information Service and wrote two anti-Communist novels in English and Chinese, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) and Naked Earth (1956).

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