Introduction to Special Issue: China and the West in Dialogue

Abstract

The origins of the articles in this issue of Literature and Theology lie in a series of international seminars held in Renmin University of China in Beijing between 2012 and 2014. These were gatherings of scholars and students from China, Hong Kong, the USA, Canada, and Scotland whose concern was to further intellectual understanding between the cultures of East and West through reflections on issues in the study of literature and religion, translation, and hermeneutics. In addition to the contemporary critical context in hermeneutical thinking and the adoption in China of what has become known as ‘scriptural reasoning’ (a term first found in the early 1990s amongst a group of Jewish scholars engaged in comparative readings of the Christian Bible and the Jewish Tanakh), these articles here refer back to the 19th century and in particular to the work of James Legge, the first Professor of Chinese Literature and Language in the University of Oxford and for 30 years a missionary/scholar in China who produced numerous translations of the Chinese Classics and made them known to English readers. Legge’s rendering of biblical stories in the form of Chinese novels and his appreciation of Confucianism and Daoism are important, and too often forgotten, moments in the eventual development of the studies of comparative religion and comparative literature—the articles in this issue will offer some reflections on these questions. Balance is always hard to maintain in such intercultural negotiations, and it is for that reason that this issue of the journal has two editors, one Chinese and one British.