Cambridge Critics and China: An Introduction

This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue of the Cambridge Quarterly, ‘Cambridge English and China’. It focuses on four Cambridge critics, I. A. Richards, William Empson, F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams, and their respective connections with China. The intellectual conversation that was initiated by Richards and Empson during their teaching in China proves to be continuously fruitful and influential, as is demonstrated in the recent engagements with these four critics by contemporary Chinese scholars.