Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China

From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahns insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pounds mediated journeys to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the flux of travel including poems, novels, autobiographies this study argues that the tumultuous social and political context of Chinas Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine Chinas influence on Western modernism through language, translation, and discourse, the book recovers a materialist engagement with landscapes, objects, and things as transcribed through travel, ethnographic encounter, and embodied experience. The book is organized by three themes which suggest formal strategies through which notions cultural modernity were explored or contested: borderlands, cosmopolitan performances, and mobile poetics. As it draws from archival sources in order to develop these themes, this study offers a place-based historical perspective on Chinas changing status in Western literary cultures.