This book illuminates the “steep, short and international career” of the political novel as a “world genre” between the 1830s and the first decade of the twentieth century (1). Situating Chinese political novels written during the decade of “Reform of Governance” (xinzheng 新政) from 1900 to 1911 as explicit parts of this world genre, Catherine Vance Yeh highlights the processes of transcultural interaction that allowed these texts to flourish and emphasizes that “transcultural nature is not marginal but essential to this genre” (14). Guided by the premise that “transcultural interaction is not a recent phenomenon but the lifeline of culture altogether” (7), Yeh utilizes an approach that critically differs from established comparative literature practice in that she does not simply engage in comparisons of textual samples but instead considers the ways in which different authors, writing in their particular contexts and languages, create local configurations of a world genre...

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