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This study approaches the writing of literary modernity in Romantic England and Republican China by focusing on a selection of literary forms that serve as testing grounds for the enactment of new sociopolitical forms of life. These literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—serve as sites in which questions of simultaneously literary-aesthetic and sociopolitical importance are tested. These questions include: what does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating elements of heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, these texts explore by literary means the far from self-evident question of how to be modern in different lifeworlds.

I would like to comment here further on the specificity of the term “Romantic,” a category that appears somewhat of an oddity in terms of English literary history. Whereas “Elizabethan,” “Restoration,” and “Victorian” are terms that correspond to categories of sovereign succession, Romanticism, like modernism, does not fit so neatly within the nomenclature or period logic of English national literature. Its origins are more cosmopolitan, developing as a Western European phenomenon with iterations throughout Europe and the Americas, gaining impetus from the philosophical and political claims informing the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Its complexity manifests itself in the bardic nationalisms of Percy and Pseudo-Ossian, among others, as well as in decontextualizing assimilations by writers everywhere, including early twentieth-century China, who equate Romanticism simply with the subjectivist expression of untrammeled feeling.³⁴ What makes Romanticism most significant, however, as both a moment and a corollary of world literature, is its disposition as a textual practice that contains its own critique, that theorizes and reflects on its own conditions of reading and its status as imaginative literature.³⁵ It is this critical disposition, issuing from the conversation between literature and philosophy internal to Romanticism’s origins, that makes Romantic writing continually illuminating to read with.

The incipience of literary modernity in China in the early twentieth century likewise gave rise to a critical disposition in practices of writing that offer critical reflections on their own status as imaginative writing while situating themselves in relation to a tradition of Chinese letters undergoing reclassification and revaluation. Like English Romanticism, the writing of early twentieth-century China gains impetus from philosophical claims informing political revolution. Like late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, early twentieth-century China was a period in which questions of literary modernity were entwined with questions of political modernity.

The writings I study in this book stage quests for modernity. They ask what it is to be modern and how to address others as modern, enacting modernity as a set of questions rather than as the fulfillment of preconceived and programmatic definitions. In so doing, they take orientation from a framework of world literature as a condition of connection and comparison between languages and cultures. They take orientation also from the principles of freedom, equality, and mutuality pronounced explicitly as ideals in the turns to republicanism and democracy in the revolutions of the eighteenth century. If the Enlightenment articulates the equal authority of human beings everywhere to make laws for themselves as users of reason, the punctual, rationalist conception of modern subjectivity therein, it has often been noted, fails, often catastrophically, to acknowledge the complexity of human beings in their existences in language and history. As universal sociopolitical principles of humanity, freedom, equality, and mutuality are by themselves empty. They have substance only in the actuality of language or, more precisely, of languages that serve as vital mediums of inhabitation and imagination and thus operativity and efficacy. The efforts to write literary modernity in England and China at issue in this study reckon with how to be modern by grappling insistently with the question of how to address others as free and equal subjects in evolving configurations of mutuality. This ethical and philosophical endeavor is at the heart of their (self-)critical disposition.

Crucial for this endeavor and for this study is the fact that these writings do not pursue the quest for modernity in isolation. Rather, they receive articulation from and within histories and traditions that they variously repeat, displace, unwork, renew, and reevaluate. In these various operations, the texts in question evince critical awareness of their own implication within textual traditions and cultural configurations whose terms and conditions they test and revise. With this critical self-consciousness, these texts demand for their own reading the rereading also of the histories and traditions in which they are inscribed. By making such demands, these texts demonstrate how their own claims to modernity issue from and establish themselves by activating potentialities inherent in aspects of heterogeneous pasts.

Walter Benjamin has used the figure of the “constellation” to characterize the workings of a recursive temporality, in contrast to the articulation of historical meaning within the terms of consecutive chronology. In Supplement A to the theses “On the Concept of History,” he distinguishes between a historicism that tells “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” and a historicism that would involve instead the historian grasping “the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one,” and thus establishing “a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time.”³⁶ I invoke the figure of the constellation from Benjamin to designate the operations whereby the English and Chinese writers in question establish alike the nowness (the modernity) of their own times in relation to earlier eras within different cultural configurations.³⁷ Both sets of writers find sidereal orientation in the task of writing as subjects of modernity and of addressing their readers as modern subjects, but their constellatory historiographies take place in the mediums of different languages that carry within them the legacies of different metaphorics and logics of messianism and redemption.

Each chapter is dedicated to a literary form ostensibly common to both sets of writings. Instead of assuming the priority of the Western iteration as standard for imitation by non-Western writers, a fallacy attending the presumption of monoculturalism, each chapter investigates how the form in question derives from and renews antecedents in separate traditions. Each chapter focuses on uses of the form by select writers and performs close readings of these specific cases rather than broadly surveying uses of the form in the periods in question. Through close reading, each chapter analyzes how the particular literary form serves as the testing ground and site for enactments of modern sociopolitical forms of life. Each chapter traces the way the texts in question establish their nowness through critical and creative activation of the potential of textual practices from earlier eras in separate traditions. If close reading involves a shuttling back and forth between poetics and theory, comparative close reading of cross-cultural scope involves shuttling back and forth between different traditions of poetics and theory.

Chapter 1 approaches the literary manifesto as an exemplary form of literary modernity, which writers everywhere have used to declare bold new conceptions of literature and aesthetics. The form’s global flourishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, charted by Martin Puchner in Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, was preceded by the wave of new definitions of poetry and declarations of new poetics by Romantic writers in an earlier age of political revolution.³⁸ In the later moment, coinciding with the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republican era in China, Chinese writers composed various calls and proposals, very often nationalistic and programmatic, for a new Chinese literature. In the context of a radical and comprehensive reorganization of knowledge, these calls engage with the definition and institution of literature deriving from the European eighteenth century while participating in a classical category of writings on literary thought, the wenlun. My chapter focuses on literary manifestos by two major writers whose critical sophistication and wide-ranging erudition have made their work both sources of literary influence and forces in ongoing legacies of cultural critique. It reads together Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 A Defence of Poetry alongside two 1908 essays by Lu Xun, “On the Power of Mara Poetry” and “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices.” The two sets of texts are internally connected by the claim of solidarity Lu Xun makes with the “Mara poets,” a coinage with which he renames Southey’s “Satanic School” and that he extends to include, besides Byron and Shelley, the Russian poets Pushkin and Lermontov, the Polish poets Mickiewicz and Slowacki, and the Hungarian Sándor Petöfi. Lu Xun, who read Japanese, German, and perhaps a smidgen of Russian but not English, Polish, or Hungarian, relied on a variety of secondary sources to write his essay calling for the spirit of Mara poetry to renew literature and culture in China. While Byron and Byronism play a prominent role in his organization of the essay, it is, strikingly, with Shelley that Lu Xun, unbeknownst to himself, shows the most profound affinity. Both Shelley and Lu Xun figure poetic voice as an event of emancipatory newness throughout their writings, showing sustained critical preoccupation with the question of how an emancipated poetic voice may function as an emancipating poetic force in separate but connected fields of utterance and address.

This chapter analyzes the claims for the emancipatory power of the poetic voice in Shelley, which emanates from inhuman sources through the poet as medium, and it performs an exegesis of the “voices of newness” and “voices of the soul”—homophonous as xinsheng in Chinese—that Lu Xun attributes to the European Mara poets, calls for among his Chinese contemporaries, and derives from classical Chinese poetics. The chapter compares how Shelley and Lu Xun both espouse in their critical texts literary historiographies that involve cyclical return, with newness emerging not within a scheme of linear progression but out of the ashes of traditions that may contain sparks of renewing power. Hence, Shelley can use Aeschylean tragedy to allegorize cosmic renewal and the reorigination of language in Prometheus Unbound, and Lu Xun can write his two 1908 treatises not in the vernacular, which he would later promote as national and literary language, but in a stylized form of classical Chinese. He conducts a philological experiment, writing in a style that mixes contemporary neologisms with archaisms that predate the standardized classical Chinese of late imperial times that he associates with the ossifications of state orthodoxy. He responds to new political concepts by activating heterodox potentialities in classical poetics to advance his interpretation of modernity.

Chapter 2 moves from the high register of the literary manifesto, with its claims to inaugurate and emancipate, to the middling register of the tale collection, whose aim is to enchant and entertain. The form of the tale collection has long held popular appeal across cultures, serving as a vehicle for the recounting of adventures in faraway places or supernatural events in everyday life. In eighteenth-century Europe, the introduction of The Arabian Nights through processes of translation and redaction kindled an interest in “oriental tales” among European readers, for whom the encounter with the foreign was mixed with elements of the exotic and the fantastic.³⁹ In late Qing and early Republican China, toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, collections of tales by such writers as Rider Haggard and Jules Verne ranked among the most popular texts in translation and entertained readers with stories of adventures that featured more than small doses of the improbable.⁴⁰

This chapter approaches Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1806 Tales from Shakespeare as a variation on such a form. Commissioned for the Juvenile Library of William and Mary Jane Godwin, the Lambs’s Tales consist of prose redactions of twenty plays by Shakespeare: fourteen romances and comedies, six tragedies, and none of the histories. The collection had the distinction of being not only widely read in Regency and Victorian England, playing a role in the literary education of English children, but widely circulated, reprinted, anthologized, and translated in the British Empire and beyond in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this latter capacity, the collection played a role in transmitting internationally the literary canonization of Shakespeare that had started taking place in England at the end of the eighteenth century. The Tales were translated into Chinese in 1904 with the title Yinbian Yanyu by Lin Shu, who was on his way to becoming the sociopolitically and culturally transitional era’s most widely read and acclaimed translator of foreign, primarily Western, literature. Attributed to Shakespeare instead of the Lambs, Yinbian Yanyu—a title with literati cultural connotations loosely translatable as A Poet Reading from Afar—was the first Shakespearean text of any sort to appear in Chinese.

Lin was a translator who famously did not know any foreign languages, relying on collaborators who would interpret the literal meaning of texts he would then render in vivid and stylized classical Chinese. While he effectively did more than any other man of letters in his generation to expose Chinese readers to foreign literature, Lin was also, curiously, a political and cultural conservative who stood out in the reformist climate of his time for his Qing loyalism and adherence to Confucian classicism. His success and influence consisted in his rendering of Western novels and story collections in an idiom and form uncannily recognizable to his Chinese readers. He adapted the Lambs’s Tales to the classical narrative form of the chuanqi (literally “transmission of the strange”), with its episodic structure and association with supernatural and exotic content. As the prose fiction form of chuanqi served also as the basis for theatrical adaptations, Lin found a resonant cultural counterpart for his retelling in Chinese of the Lambs’s prose adaptation of Shakespeare’s theatrical texts, themselves retellings of borrowed stories.

This chapter examines how each set of retellers manipulates the form of the tale collection to address and fashion an imagined “common reader”—that quintessentially nineteenth-century character of global literary and cultural history whose ascendancy in various locales is predicated on the spread of literacy and the increasing accessibility of printed matter. I focus on retellings of one play, The Tempest, to analyze how the characters of Miranda and Prospero emerge in the respective texts as figures or surrogates for the emergent common reader as a middling, imaginative subject in times of social enfranchisement and cultural change. While the literary manifesto functions as a form through which writers can self-consciously undertake the task of interrogating what it means to be modern, the tale collection affords, at the more modest eye-level of storytelling, a perspective onto modern configurations of social structures that are less perceptible because more local and gradual.

Chapter 3 examines the form of the familiar or informal essay, which flourished in Republican China from the early 1920s until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, facilitated by the vibrant periodical press in metropolitan areas. In a 1921 essay in the Beijing Chenbao or Morning News, Zhou Zuoren, younger brother of Lu Xun and a leading figure in the New Culture or May Fourth Movement of 1919, points to a line of Anglo-American essayists from Addison to Chesterton as inspiration for his Chinese contemporaries. What characterizes the familiar or informal essay, as distinct from the critical or polemical essay, is a casual, informal tone with which the author simulates conversation with the reader as peer and uses occasions in ordinary life as points of departure and topics for reflection.

Among the English and American writers Zhou highlights is Charles Lamb, whose Essays of Elia had been serialized with great success in the London Magazine in the 1820s. An alter ego of Lamb, Elia is a clerk in the South Seas Office who, like Lamb, a clerk for a quarter century with the East India Company, writes in his leisure hours of the uncanniness of ordinary life in an increasingly globally connected and commercialized England. Without using a quasi-fictional character as a persona, Zhou wrote a century later of how seemingly trivial matters like comestibles and tea-drinking can serve as things that tease readers out of habitual contexts and ways of thought.

This chapter studies how Lamb and Zhou use the medium of the familiar essay to explore the strangeness of the everyday in writings that subtly position London and Beijing within a global network of multiple other locations, metropolitan and otherwise. At the same time, the aesthetic techniques of these writings show very different cultural derivations. In a close reading of Lamb’s “Old China,” this chapter analyzes Lamb’s ironic use of an aesthetics of dioramic realism to express the pleasures and discontents of average bourgeois citizenship. It examines, in contrast, how Zhou practices a poetics of taxonomic lyricism in the essay “Wild Vegetables of My Hometown.” In his capacity as a literary historian and theorist—and not just practitioner—of the familiar essay form, Zhou traces the form’s predilection for the idle and idiosyncratic to late Ming dynasty or late sixteenth- to seventeenth-century practices of informal prose writing and elucidates the sociopolitically heterodox and dehierarchizing impulses and potential of such practices. While participating in different genealogies for the writing of the ordinary, Lamb and Zhou both attempt to address and unsettle, with gentle irony, the reader as a peer in the incremental and everyday task of rediscovering the ordinary.

Chapter 4 investigates the domestic novel as a literary form in which the woman as protagonist and the site of the household come to the fore as subject and scene of modernity. It concentrates on novels by two of the form’s preeminent practitioners in English and Chinese, Jane Austen and Eileen Chang, who have drawn comparisons to each other for their clear, even cold-eyed, depictions of social and economic constraints on femininity and the complexity of feminine interiority. These writers share also a general narratorial position of ironic detachment vis-à-vis their female protagonists. They are each perhaps at their most mercilessly dissecting in their portrayals of their least likable heroines, Fanny Price in the 1814 Mansfield Park and Cao Qiqiao in the 1943 novella Jinsuo ji, which Chang herself translated into English as The Golden Cangue. This chapter reads together Austen’s Mansfield Park and Chang’s later bilingual rewriting of her 1943 novella as the novel-length Yuannü and The Rouge of the North (1967) after Chang’s emigration to the United States in the 1950s. From a diasporic perspective, in the turbulent first decades of the People’s Republic of China, Chang revisits her earlier Republican-era text in novelistic form. She renames the heroine “Yindi” and incorporates a dimension absent from the novella—sustained references by the protagonist to the Peking opera as well as the inclusion of a private performance as an event in the narrative.

Austen and Chang’s novels show how changes in the articulation of femininity in different historical and cultural contexts take place in correlation to redefinitions of the status of the household itself as a site of modern life. Traditionally the domain of femininity and processes of production and reproduction that sustain ordinary life, the household emerges in political economic redistributions of authority in modernity as a site wherein questions of what it means to pursue a meaningful life may be raised anew. Both Austen and Chang incorporate the medium of theater into their narrations in ways that facilitate reflection on the shifts in consequence of the household. While Chang weaves the Peking opera into Yuannü and The Rouge of the North, Austen features in Mansfield Park the rehearsal of one play, Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1798 Lovers’ Vows, and the reading aloud of another, Henry VIII, attributed in Austen’s time to Shakespeare but today to Shakespeare and John Fletcher. On the level of plot and character development, the medium of theater works in these novels to mediate the heroines’ reflections on their own positions and identities within larger sociocultural frameworks. On the literary historiographical level, the incorporation of theater into the domestic novel allows the latter to define itself genealogically as a modern literary form in relation to theatrical traditions, which appear in both works as historically changing and culturally specific frameworks for the aesthetic mediation of community. Each novel displaces and takes on aspects of the work of theater by restaging “woman” as modern agent and spectatorial subject on the plane of the ordinary.