This book studies the reception history of Western literature in China from the 1840s to the present. Qi explores the socio-historical contexts and the contours of how Western literature was introduced, mostly through translation and assesses its transformative impact in the cultural, literary as well as sociopolitical life of modern China.
Broken tools -- The name is changed, but the tale is told of you -- Double exposure -- Looking backward? -- The national classicist -- Becoming Wang Jingxuan -- Conclusion : pure and chaste writing
This book studies the reception history of Western literature in China from the 1840s to the present. Qi explores the socio-historical contexts and the contours of how Western literature was introduced, mostly through translation and assesses its transformative impact in the cultural, literary as well as sociopolitical life of modern China.
Chinese and Western Literary Influence in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Trilogy examines Liu Cixin’s acclaimed trilogy, a Chinese science fiction epic whose translation is exceedingly popular in the Western world. Will Peyton argues that the ingenuity of Liu’s writing is found in its conscious engagement with translated Western fiction rather than, as one might expect, in Chinese language science fiction of the past. The book illustrates how contemporary Chinese fiction, since the economic opening of China in the late 1980s, is deeply and complexly influenced by various strains in Western literary and intellectual thought, an area that scholars of Chinese literature have tended to neglect. Providing a lucid and succinct close-reading and textual analysis of Three Body trilogy, the book also makes reference to broader ideas and themes in modern Chinese and Western intellectual history.
This translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern. China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a “Heavenly Principle” that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China’s irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.
After the first chapter, which deals with the theoretical issues, ensuing chapters treat particular instances of translingual practice such as national character, individualism, stylistic innovations, first-person narration, and canon formation
Contains English translations of Chinese writings drawn from throughout a period of four hundred years, including poems, drama, fiction, songs, biographies, and early works of philosophy and history; arranged chronologically and by genre, with introductory quotes and comments.
Translation has been instrumental in opening the door between China and the rest of the world from ancient times to the present day, and has helped facilitate cultural exchange and the sharing of knowledge. This book makes and important contribution to the study of translation into and from Chinese. A wide range of topics are covered, such as Chinese canonization of Buddhism, Chinese cultural identity and authenticity in translation, Chinese poetry, opera, politics and ideology in translation, and the individual contributions made by translators to modernity and globalisation. The analyses and arguments offered by the authors make this book a must read for anyone interested in translation from a Chinese perspective.
Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history. Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less—except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn—not only about their leaders, but also about their own people—stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world. A kind of Brave New World reflecting the China of our times, The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.
In Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation, the authors investigate the significant role translation plays in the act of cultural mediation. They pay attention to transnational organizations that bring about cross-cultural interactions as well as regulating authorities, in the form of both nation-states and ideologies, which dictate what, and even how, to translate. Under such circumstances, is there room for individual translators or mediators to exercise their free will? To what extent are they allowed to do so? The authors see translation as a "shaping force." While intending to shape, or reshape, certain concepts through the translating act, translators and cultural actors need to negotiate among multifarious institutional powers that coexist, including traditional and foreign. Contributors include: Françoise Kreissler, Angel Pino, Shan Te-hsing, Nicolai Volland, Joyce C. H. Liu, Huang Ko-wu, Isabelle Rabut, Xiaomei Chen, Zhang Yinde, Peng Hsiao-yen, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, and Pin-chia Feng.
