On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China

by Emily Sun

Overview

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. 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. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization.

The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel 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 and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds.

Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823294787
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Series:	Lit Z
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Emily Sun is Visiting Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College. She is author of Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (Fordham, 2010) and co-editor of The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham, 2007).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reading Literary Modernities on the Horizon of World Literature | 1

1. Literary Modernity and the Emancipation of Voice:
Defences of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun | 23

2. Shakespearean Retellings and the Question of the Common Reader:
Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Lin Shu’s Yinbian Yanyu | 50

3. Estrangements of the World in the Familiar Essay:
Charles Lamb and Zhou Zuoren’s Approaches to the Ordinary | 73

4. Between the Theater and the Novel:
Woman, Modernity, and the Restaging of the Ordinary in Mansfield Park and The Rouge of the North | 92

Coda | 137

Acknowledgments | 141

Notes | 145

Index | 161

Editorial Reviews

On the Horizon of World Literature is an outstanding, original, and groundbreaking book. Sun shows how asynchronous and historically unrelated works can be brought together for mutual illumination. Sun’s comparisons take into consideration the historical significance of texts as responses to modernity and their very existence as products of historical forces that shape what we understand as modernity. The author’s ambition in treating texts as fields of interlocking developments marks the book’s originality.—Wai-Yee Li, Harvard University

Emily Sun’s pathbreaking book bridges early twentieth-century Chinese literature and early nineteenth-century British literature in an entirely original and convincing way. By building this remarkable, two-way literary dialogue—across cultures, periods, and continents—Sun reawakens the promise and the necessity of comparative literature, as a unique discipline with new stories still to tell.—Alex Woloch, Stanford University

From the Publisher

. . . [Sun's] engaging and thoughtful critical readings will inspire and motivate more scholars to undertake such comparativist readings in this most fascinating area of cultural and literary relations.

The Wordsworth Circle

On the Horizon of World Literature offers an exciting methodological challenge to future work on world literature. Moving away from the big picture models popular in recent discourse on the topic, Sun’s development of a translingual approach to close reading favors the recounting of intimate narratives of literary history rather than the search for broad patterns.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

Emily Sun’s pathbreaking book bridges early twentieth-century Chinese literature and early nineteenth-century British literature in an entirely original and convincing way. By building this remarkable, two-way literary dialogue—across cultures, periods, and continents—Sun reawakens the promise and the necessity of comparative literature, as a unique discipline with new stories still to tell.

Alex Woloch

On the Horizon of World Literature is an outstanding, original, and groundbreaking book. Sun shows how asynchronous and historically unrelated works can be brought together for mutual illumination. Sun’s comparisons take into consideration the historical significance of texts as responses to modernity and their very existence as products of historical forces that shape what we understand as modernity. The author’s ambition in treating texts as fields of interlocking developments marks the book’s originality.

Wai-Yee Li