... in European literature exile literature cross-cultural borrowing In November 1948 the naval officer and photographer Aleksandr Brodsky (1903–84) returned home from a long absence. First mobilized for the war against Finland in 1940, he had served in World War II and was later posted to China. An award...

... book is published in New York, Paris, Beijing, Taipei, or Jakarta. For speakers of European languages, “China and the world” has the ring of a novelty. Diplomatic, commercial, and other negotiations are often conducted under the self-congratulatory slogan “China...

... than their American and European colleagues at keeping social and political reality at a distance. The literary background of Chinese postmodernism is as multifac- eted as China’s history of the last hundred years. First, there is socialist realism, including some Russian novels considered...

... literature emerged in China in the late nineteenth century and flourished during the 1930s in works by writers, from the famous to the less well known, who shared the expe- rience of having studied abroad. Like nineteenth-century American writers who used European travel and travel writing...

... European avant-gardists often employ aesthetic means to cri- tique social norms and to express radical political views. For aesthetics to stand against coercive politics, and for aesthetics to become politi- cized in centralized and “authoritarian” societies, is not exceptional.6 China’s avant-garde...

... archipelago somehow can stand metonymically for European encounters with China and Japan. These assumptions often simply invert the moral valence of the colonizers’ model of the world rather than questioning its values, principles, and cavalier handling of historical evidence.6 These default narratives...

... or in a nightclub’s bathroom. The European is described as hypermasculine, with an animal-like libido that satisfies Coco’s bodily needs. In contrast, her Chinese lover, Tian Tian, is effeminate, sensitive, soft, melancholic, and impotent. Here we see the familiar libidinal dynamics between China and the West...

... is indebted to Ricci and his “accommodationist” approach to the conversion of China, translation is always possible. Whatever difference exists between Europe and China, Leibniz “is able to retranslate that difference into a difference within European thinking” (44) on the grounds that “c’est tout...

... of the next generation. Since Lu Xun read, admired, introduced, and trans- lated European literary works into China, some works of early Western modernism must have had some influence on him. But since he had no direct access to Western writings belonging to the modernist canon, Lu Xun’s literary...

... of the supposed “continent of sentimentality.” The rise of sentimentality was observed not only in European fiction, however, but in East Asia since the late nineteenth century, when many fictional works about romance and marriage were translated from Europe. In China there was a well-established literary...

... and literary circles to European ideological and philosophical circles. Parties to the debate were aware, either clearly or vaguely, that literary modern- ism had been on the decline since World War II. As a new episteme or cultural dominant, postmodernism had displaced modernism. But in China...

... David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849 –  1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). He Women and the Search for Modernity 49 Nora in China’s Problem Plays At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese literature...

...- nese culture and literature. To these conservatives, the May 4 Move- ment set Chinese modernity in motion, destroying the mechanism of China’s long-lasting nationalism. Many see the Chinese language now as undergoing “Europeanization” or “Westernization.” But to my mind, this process is a direct...

... to reexamine a famous passage by Voltaire’s contemporary Smith. Writing in 1760, Smith adds to the second edition of his Theory of Moral Senti- ments  an earthquake passage, clearly inspired by Lisbon though set in China, that demonstrates how little the average educated European cares about disasters...

... the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist camp, Badiou retained his belief in Marxism and Maoism. So it is not surprising that his “unwavering fidelity to the Chinese Cultural Revolution reveals a transferential relation with Maoism and revolutionary China,” marked by “uninterrupted...

... in the developed countries but also because of the economic strength of the various non-European powers, whether primarily sustained by resource extraction (as in Saudi Arabia) or by manufacturing exports (as in China or Japan). The challenge facing the liberal and left ideals rooted in the Enlightenment comes...

.... Certainly, different modes of translation offer different means of corn- ing to terms with otherness, or pastness, or foreignness. What all have in common, however, is the richness of the instant.’ Learning (about) Chinese China had been on the distant horizon of European thought since...

... “necessity” behind our cultural heritage. Whereas studying India or the Arab world reveals other civilizations that have widely practiced the cult of scripture while developing “secu- lar” literature, China presents perhaps the only one of the great liter- ary civilizations to have...

... and as such became the most influential term in modern Chinese literature (Anderson 1990 : 3). Though Lu Xun’s realism has been called into question, as Anderson ( 1990 : 5) counsels, “particularly in a case like China, where debate about realism has played such a crucial role in the development of a major literary...

... collections of essays. Mingliu Hu and Joan Everskog’s Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600–1950 (2016) presents the efforts of thinkers from the Qing Dynasty and the Republican period to understand their nation and its culture in a regional context; Christopher Rea’s China’s Literary Cosmopolitans (2015...