On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China by Emily Sun

Abstract

Reviewed by: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China by Emily Sun Shuyu Guo (bio) Emily Sun. On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. New York: Fordham, 2021. Pp. x + 176. $105.00 hardcover / $30.00 paperback / $29.99 eBook. In On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, Emily Sun examines the literary affinities between British Romanticism and Republican China (1912–49), the latter representing a transitional period that links the imperial regime to modern republicanism. In analyzing the texts written by authors such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Lu Xun, Sun explores the common ground between British Romantic literature and modern Chinese literature while paying attention to historical actuality and the local details that animate respective languages. Indeed, the notion of world literature provides the framework for analyzing literary histories and literary modernities across multiple time periods and locations. The “world” of “world literature” is continually “activated and reactivated in processes of exposure and exchange” (3). Through four sets of comparative analysis, she investigates how particular literary forms of modernity serve as the testing grounds for the enactment of sociopolitical forms of life, and how various aesthetic and literary endeavors play a role in the formation of world modernity across linguistic and geographical boundaries. Chapter 1, “Literary Modernity and the Emancipation of Voice: Defenses of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun,” begins with discussions of literary manifestos—a form of solidarity and poetic emancipation—with an emphasis on the problem of voice. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley shows “the principle of cyclicity” (41) and how it plays a role in poetry that “takes place as reorigination” (40). In 1821, he wrote Defence of Poetry, which showed how poetic voices worked as emancipatory power. Shelley was partly inspired by the tradition of mythology. Likewise, 鲁迅 Lu Xun composed his 摩罗诗力说 “On the Power of Mara Poetry” that assimilated the impacts from the European Mara poets. In the text, Lu Xun looks for the power from the renewal of classical poetics and languages. Besides, 破恶声论 “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” written in classical Chinese that mixes new neologisms with “an archaic style” (34), exemplifies the possibilities of language itself. In his manifestos, Lu Xun expresses his own xinsheng 心声 (voice of the soul) in classical Chinese. Through reading the Japanese translations of Shelley, Lu Xun’s [End Page 461] poetics was heavily influenced by Shelleyan mythmaking in terms of the emancipation of voice. He “combines elements of the ethereal aestheticist Shelley with the convention-defying aspects of the Byronic hero” (25). The transcultural and translingual nature of Lu Xun’s poetic voice is consistent with that of modern Chinese literature which has been affected by world literatures. Their literary manifestos perform “the work of emancipatory renewal within and across literary modernities” (49). On the horizon of world literature, the concept of literary modernity is deeply global and mediated; it suggests, rather than denying the common ground between literatures. Translation facilitated resonances across languages and the process of forming world modernity; Lu Xun read Shelley in Japanese and Lu Xun’s work was later translated into various languages. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales are known for their literary characterization of social structures. The Tales were translated into Chinese in 1904, entitled Yinbian Yanyu 吟边燕语, by ᷇林纾 Lin Shu. The text was adapted to the classical Chinese narrative form of chuanqi 传奇 (transmission of the strange) with a new episodic structure, supernatural narratives, and exotic hints. In chapter 2, “Shakespearean Retelling and the Question of the Common Reader: Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Lin Shu’s Yinbian Yanyu,” Sun argues that Lin’s retelling manipulates the form of the tale collection to address an imagined “common reader” in “heterogeneous, asynchronous, but connected scenes of global literary modernity” (51). Chuanqi previously existed in Chinese traditional operas and dramas and had not been employed in literary texts. On the one hand, though Lin’s domesticated translations nonetheless mediate each retelling of Shakespeare, the idiosyncratic form chuanqi—a stylistic alternative— will not hinder common readers’ understanding of the...