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

by Emily Sun, Kirill Batygin (Translator)

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887193458
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Series:	Contemporary Eastern Studies
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Language:	Russian

About the Author

Emily Sun is Associate Professor and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (Fordham UP, 2010) and co-editor of The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham UP, 2007). She is currently co-editing, with Orrin N. Wang, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature.

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

. . . [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 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

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