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

180 Pages·2021·1.822 MB·English

by  Emily Sun

ON THE HORIZON
OF WORLD LITERATURE
Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors
Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by conventional
notions of history, periodicity, and culture, and committed to the
work of reading. Books in the series may seem untimely,
anachronistic, or out of touch with contemporary trends because
they have arrived too early or too late. Lit Z creates a space for
books that exceed and challenge the tendencies of our field and
in doing so reflect on the concerns of literary studies here and
abroad.
At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms
literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism.
Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of
romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well as
forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the
unfulfilled possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they
focus on the romantic period, books in this series epitomize
romanticism as a way of thinking that compels another relation
to the present. Lit Z is the first book series to take seriously this
capacious sense of romanticism.
In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars of
romanticism, team- taught a course called Literature Z that aimed
to make an intervention into the fundamentals of literary study.
Hartman and de Man invited students to read a series of
increasingly difficult texts and through attention to language and
rhetoric compelled them to encounter “the bewildering variety
of ways such texts could be read.” The series’ conceptual
resonances with that class register the importance of recollection,
reinvention, and reading to contemporary criticism. Its books
explore the creative potential of reading’s untimeliness and
history’s enigmatic force.
ON THE HORIZON
OF WORLD LITERATURE
Forms of Modernity in Romantic England
and Republican China
Emily Sun
Fordham University Press
New York 2021
Copyright © 2021 Fordham University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sun, Emily, author.
Title: On the horizon of world literature : forms of modernity in romantic
England and republican China / Emily Sun.
Description: New York : Fordham University Press, 2021. | Series: Lit Z |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051686 | ISBN 9780823294787 (hardback) | ISBN
9780823294787 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823294800 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Literature—Philosophy. | Civilization, Modern, in
literature. | Comparative literature—English and Chinese. | Comparative
literature—Chinese and English.
Classification: LCC PN49 .S846 2021 | DDC 801—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051686
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
To Clay, and to the memory of my grandmother
Alice Tsai Yu, listeners extraordinaire

Contents
Introduction: Reading Literary Modernities
on the Horizon of World Literature 1
1. Literary Modernity and the Emancipation
of Voice: Defences of Poetry by Percy
Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun 23
2. Shakespearean Retellings and the Question
of the Common Reader: Charles and
Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare
and Lin Shu’s Yinbian Yanyu 50
3. Estrangements of the World in the
Familiar Essay: Charles Lamb and Zhou
Zuoren’s Approaches to the Ordinary 73
4. Between the Theater and the Novel:
Woman, Modernity, and the Restaging
of the Ordinary in Mansfield Park
and The Rouge of the North 92
Coda 137
Acknowledgments 141
Notes 145
Index 161

ON THE HORIZON
OF WORLD LITERATURE