Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China

<p>From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai to Ezra Pound’s 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 China’s Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine China’s 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 China’s changing status in Western literary cultures. </p>