Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

Comparative Literature in China

268 Comparative Literature in China Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong On the landscape of modern Chinese literary scholarship, comparative literature is perhaps one of the most versatile and active fields of study. As an academic discipline and a mode of intellectual inquiry and scholarly production , comparative literature was imported to China from the West, via Japan, in the early twentieth century. At a time of major intellectual and social shifts of the country and when many Chinese writers, artists, as well as scholars took upon themselves to reform traditional values and practices, radical intellectuals such as Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, and Zhou Zuoren, among others, advocated the importation and acceptance of Western thought. Parallel to this and as a natural result of the said interest, the translation of Western works became a national enterprise and the domains of literature experienced an unprecedented influx of new concepts, formulations, approaches, and practices. In the scholarship of literature new areas of study were established and comparative literature was one of them. The term comparative literature (bijiao wenxue) was first used by the poet and critic Huang Ren (1869–1913), a professor of literature at Suzhou University , in his lecture notes where he refers to Posnett’s 1886 Comparative Literature (see Xu 109). Next, Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature, encountered Western writings on comparative literature while he was a student in Japan: in a letter he wrote in 1911 to Xu Shoushang, Lu mentions the Japanese translation of Frédéric Loliée’s 1906 Histoire des litt ératures comparées des origines au XXe siècle (see Lu Vol. 11, 331) and he has used the comparative method in his work as early as 1907 (see Lu Vol. 1, 63–115). In the early twentieth century, when in China Western culture and thought gained much currency, in literary scholarship a discipline that explores Chinese and Western literatures would have its natural appeal. Thus, the general interest in the subject and approach resulted in a series of translations of Western works. For example, Fu Donghua, a translator of considerable repute, translated and published in 1930 Loliée’s Histoire des littératures comparées and Paul Van Tieghem’s La Littérature comparée was brought out in Chinese in 1937 by the poet Dai Wangshu (1905–1950), only six years after its publication in Paris in 1931. Further, poets Zhang Xishen and Wang Fuquan, respectively, translated from Japanese and French works on comparative literature : Zhang’s translations appeared in the journal New China in the 1920s, later reprinted by the Commercial Press and Wang’s translations were published as a series in Awakening: The Supplement of Republican Daily (1924). These texts not only popularized comparative literature but also made it possible to institute it formally as an academic subject in university education. The establishing of comparative literature as a field of study at National Tsinghua University (Beijing) in the 1920s is probably one of the most important events in the early history of comparative literature in China. At Tsinghua, courses on or closely related to comparative literature included Wu Mi’s “Zhongxishi zhi bjiao” (“Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Poetics ”) in 1926 and Chen Yinke’s “Xiren zhi dongfangxue muluxue” (“Bibliography of Sinology”) in 1927. And I.A. Richards, who was a visiting professor at Tsinghua University from 1929 to 1931, also taught comparative literature while at Tsinghua (see Xu 111). By the mid-1930s, comparative literature as an academic subject and a mode of cross-cultural inquiry was firmly established and was to further develop into a prominent discipline in the history of modern Chinese literary scholarship. The period from the 1930s to the1950s is the most formative time for the discipline in China. Then, after a period of twenty years of silence, came another active period, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. In these two main periods, series of books in the field appeared, either authored by Chinese scholars or translated into Chinese from various Western languages. In our brief survey it is not possible to record in detail all the major developments of comparative literature in China; however, here we sketch some significant moments. Our purpose is to consider the intellectual and historical conditions under which comparative literature has obtained such remarkable popularity and prominence in Chinese scholarship and to show that the development and currency of comparative literature is closely related to the formation of China...