Ibsen in China, 1908-1997: A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (review)

This bibliography is the result of twenty years of research by its author. During this period, Kwok-kan Tam wrote a dissertation and a dozen articles on Ibsen's influence in China, in addition to his publications on other subjects. This is a well-researched and clearly annotated reference book, consisting of a twenty-two-page introduction and a bibliographic text of eight groupings with the following subtitles: (1) Ibsen and the Literary Revolution 1908-1919, (2) Ibsen in the (Post-) May 4th Era 1920-1927, (3) Ibsen in the Romantic Generation 1928-1936, (4) Ibsen in Wartime China 1937-1948, (5) Ibsen and Socialism 1949-1976, (6) Ibsen Beyond Socialism 1977-1997, (7) Chinese Translations and Adaptations of Ibsen's Plays, Poetry and Critical Essays, and (8) Chinese Stage Productions of Ibsen's Plays. The first six sections contain 338 entries for books and articles on Ibsen's influence in different historical periods; the seventh section is a bibliography of fifty-four Chinese translations of Ibsen's works arranged by the publication dates of Ibsen's plays; and the eighth section is a list of twenty-four Chinese stage productions of Ibsen's plays (arranged in the same format as the translation list).

There are three appendixes as well: a chronology of Ibsen's plays, a chronology of Chinese translations, and a chronology of Chinese stage productions of Ibsen's plays. The latter two chronologies have the same content as sections 7 and 8 but are arranged differently. This bibliography also includes author/translator, title, title-by-year, and subject indexes. All the Chinese names and titles are written in pinyin and supplied with traditional Chinese characters. Those names habitually written in the Wade-Giles system are also noted with their corresponding pinyin spellings. With both characters and their romanization, the reader can read all the Chinese names, phrases, and sentences fluently and swiftly without any misleading interpretation.

The introduction first outlines the historical phases of the politics of Ibsen's reception in Western society (including the Soviet Union). The politics have centered on the reception of Ibsen either as a modern thinker and social reformer or as an artist—whether to "politicize Ibsen" or to "aestheticize him" (p. 9), as the author puts it. Next, the author applies a similar approach to his introduction on Ibsen's reception in China. He divides the history of China's reception into four major periods: 1908-1927, 1928-1948, 1949-1976, and 1977 to the present. "These four phases correspond to the historical divisions in the world reception of Ibsen" (p. 12), which the author outlines in the first half of the introduction. The first of these four periods saw China's reception of Ibsen as a social reformer; the second period first witnessed the interpretations of Ibsen with more emphasis on his dramatic innovations than on his social themes and later shifted the interpretive tendency back to the moral-political tradition; the third period was marked by social and artistic interpretations of Ibsen's plays in terms of class struggle; the fourth period, according to the author, has provided Chinese critics an opportunity to analyze Ibsen in the aesthetic-formalist mode. The first three periods of Ibsen's reception are convincingly summarized with substantiated information, and yet the summary of, or the introduction to, the fourth period does not have the same kind of supporting information probably due either to the fact that the fourth period has not yet ended or to the author's wish that the readers themselves find the evidence in bibliographic entries.

While the introduction is critically informative on China's reception as compared to the global transcultural reception of Ibsen, it does not explain the author's method and criteria for bibliographic inclusion in the main text. As is the practice of most bibliographers, the author should define the...