Abstract
Chapter 3 examines the form of the familiar or informal essay, which flourished in Republican China from the early 1920s until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, facilitated by the vibrant periodical press in metropolitan areas. In a 1921 essay in the Beijing Chen Bao or Morning News, Zhou Zuoren points to a line of Anglo-American essayists from Addison to Chesterton as inspiration for his Chinese contemporaries. What characterizes the familiar or informal essay, as distinct from the critical or polemical essay, is a casual, informal tone, with which the author simulates conversation with the reader as peer and uses occasions in ordinary life as points of departure and topics for reflection. This chapter studies how Charles Lamb, one of the essayists Zhou mentions, and Zhou himself use the medium of the familiar essay to explore the strangeness of the everyday in writings that subtly position London and Beijing within a global network of multiple locations, metropolitan and otherwise.
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