On the Description of Cityscape in Novels Written by Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang)

Zhang Ailing captures and describes various cityscapes with fierce and exquisite style. These “-scapes” not only exist as the carrier of urban civilization, but also demonstrate the looks of Shanghai’s people from all walks of life. The “-scapes” represented by apparels entail pessimistic life philosophy and connotate the emotional experience and fate of characters. Architectures, as time-markers, are shaped in the macro background of the era sensitively and organically. As for sounds, they can not only strengthen the daily space constructed by Zhang Ailing because of their inherent natural attributes, but also vividly depict the living things in the form of hearing. All kinds of “-scapes”, such as apparels, architectures, and sounds, whether fleeting or continuous, have been polished into an indispensable form in Zhang Ailing's urban writing. They are scattered all over the city and bear the unique literary significance organically and completely.

Between the Theater and the Novel

Chapter 4 investigates the domestic novel as a literary form in which the woman as protagonist and the site of the household come to the fore as subject and scene of modernity. It concentrates on novels by two of the form’s pre-eminent practitioners in English and Chinese, Jane Austen and Eileen Chang, who have drawn comparisons to each other for their clear, even cold-eyed, depictions of social and economic constraints on femininity and the complexity of feminine interiority. It reads together Austen’s 1814 Mansfield Park and Chang’s 1967 novels, Yuannü and The Rouge of the North, rewritings of her 1943 novella Jinsuo ji. These novels show how changes in the articulation of femininity in different historical and cultural contexts take place in correlation to redefinitions of the status of the household itself as site of modern life. Each novel incorporates the medium of theater to restage “woman” as modern agent and spectatorial subject on the plane of the ordinary.

On the Horizon of World Literature

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.

Between Passion and Compassion: The Story of the Stone and Its Modern Reincarnations

This study reconsiders The Story of the Stone as a literary exemplum of the “Buddhist conquest of China.” The kind of Buddhism that Stone embodies in its fictional form and makes indelible on the Chinese cultural imagination simultaneously indulges in and wavers from the Mahāyāna teachings of the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. The dialectics of truth and falsehood, love and emptiness, passion and compassion, which Stone dramatizes and problematizes, continues to stir the creative impulses of artists in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China. This study features three of Stone’s modern reincarnations. Tale of the Crimson Silk, a story by the amorous poet-monk Su Manshu (1884–1918), recasts at once the idea of Buddhist monkhood and that of “free love” in early Republican China. In Lust, Caution, a spy story by the celebrated writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995), a revolutionary heroine is compelled to weigh the emptiness/truth of carnal desire against the truth/emptiness of patriotic commitment. Decades later, love and illusion dwell again at the epicenter of a fallen empire in the director Chen Kaige’s (b. 1952) 2017 film, The Legend of the Demon Cat, in which an illustrious poet sings testimony to the (un)witting (com)passion of a femme fatale.

„Miłość jak pole bitwy”* – Ostrożnie, pożądanie Eileen Chang i Anga Lee

Film Anga Lee Ostrożnie, pożądanie jest adaptacją mikropowieści Eileen Chang. Mimo że jest wierny literze oryginału, różni się odeń pod wieloma względami. Autorzy należą do innych pokoleń. Chang opisywała swoją współczesność, Lee realizował film historyczny. Fabułę opowiedzianą przez Chang, opartą na motywach autobiograficznych, ukształtował zgodnie z wymogami współczesnego kina, rozwijając wątki, których powieść ledwo pozwalała się domyślać, bądź dopisując to, czego w niej nie było. Jeśli połączymy lekturę powieści i filmu, otrzymamy kompletny obraz niebezpiecznego związku kochanków-wrogów. Film wypełnia miejsca niedookreślenia w tekście literackim,a to, co w filmie nie zostało zwerbalizowane, wyjaśnia powieść. Istota dokonanej przez reżysera „twórczej zdrady” polega na transformacji gatunkowej utworu, który traci swoją narodową tożsamość na rzecz międzynarodowego uniwersalizmu.