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Late Qing Literary Transformations: Appropriating the Foreign and Reanimating the Tradition
Organizer: Luying Chen, Valparaiso University
Chair: Wilt L. Idema, Harvard University
Discussant: Denise Gimpel, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
The late Qing era has become an indispensable point of origin in the historiography of Chinese literary modernity. This panel explores the plurality of this modernity, constituted by the simultaneous importation of “foreign” discourses and diverse efforts to reanimate traditional literary forms. How are the dual phenomena of transformations within the tradition and intercultural transmissions of texts linked to each other during that historical time? What is the relationship between literature, nationalism and intercultural communications?
Seungjoo Yoon examines the poetry anthologies compiled by Zhang Zhidong’s (1837-1909) private secretaries, the “pioneers” of the “New Poetry” movement. Yoon argues that the notion of poetry-as-statecraft in their verses on “current affairs” (shiwu) is rooted in a transformation of High Tang poetics. Both Luying Chen and Andrew Jones examine Wu Jianren’s (1867-1910) New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji, 1905-1908), a product of the “New Fiction” movement, vis-à-vis Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (1754). Chen argues that Wu’s transformation of the classical motif of reclusion is a result of his reception of nationalist discourses in Liang Qichao’s newspapers and Liang’s theory of “New Fiction.” Jones traces Wu’s importation of motifs from Edward Bellamy’s science fiction (1850-1898) Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and Wu’s influences from evolutionary biology and developmentalist discourses of national history. Finally, Géraldine Schneider analyzes a science fantasy story by Xu Nianci (1875-1908) in comparison with its German and Japanese source texts to delineate the interplay of classical Chinese, modern Japanese and European aesthetics in the processes of cross-cultural transmission.
Poetry and Power in the Late Qing Elite Society: Zhang Zhidong’s Secretaries’ Fascination with the High Tang Lyrics
Seungjoo Yoon, Carleton College
This paper examines the transformation of pre-modern literary motifs in the late Qing times by examining the anthologies and poetics composed by scholar-poets who served as private secretaries for Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909), the viceroy of central China. These include Chen Yan (1856-1937), Tan Xian (1830-1901), Fan Zengxiang (1846-1931), Shen Zengzhi (1851-1922), Miao Quansun (1844-1919), Liang Dingfen (1859-1919), and Zheng Xiaoxu (1860-1938), soon to be known as the pioneers of the “new” poetry. The newness of their literary activities rested neither on style nor choice of themes, however. Their anthologies invoked the notion of poetry-as-statecraft and were deeply grounded in the style of High Tang poems. Their verses relating to “current affairs” (shiwu) remained a largely politicized genre of writing. What was so new about their poems? How did their concern with contemporary affairs and the old-style poetry go together? How were these scholar-poets related to such well-known lyricists as Huang Zunxian (1848-1905), Wang Guowei (1877-1927), and Lu Xun (1881-1936)? Tracing the transformative notion of orthodoxy as reflected in their literary activities, this paper argues that they reflected the gradual dissipation of Zheng-Zhu tenet in the late Qing aesthetics. Despite their reverence to Yao Nai (1731-1815), the Tongcheng School’s paragon, the works of these scholar-poets exhibited an unmistakable accommodation of divergent aesthetic currents of the time, including Han and Song Learning, and Old Text and New Text scholarship. This paper concludes that the newness of their literary activities rested on their efforts to build horizontal poetry networks on a national scale.
Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone and the Ideology of the New Fiction
Luying Chen, Valparaiso University
This paper examines the complex relationship between Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone and Liang Qichao’s theory of “New Fiction” by tracing the novel’s intertextual relationships with the newspapers Shiwu bao and Qingyi bao and Cao Xueqin’s novel The Story of the Stone. It delineates numerous layers of transformations of classical Chinese and modern Western aesthetic theory and literary motifs, and attempts to illuminate the dialogue between late Qing theory of the novel and literary practices.
First, I analyze how Liang Qichao’s theory of the novel evolved from his ideology of the newspaper. I explain Liang’s appropriation of Western nationalist discourses underlying his transformation of the Confucian ideal about the function of writing in his “On the Benefit of Newspaper Bureaus to National Affairs.” Next, I explore the dialogue between Wu’s novel and Liang’s theory of the novel. The novel first conforms to Liang’s theory by depicting Baoyu’s contrasting receptions of traditional fiction and modern newspapers and the formation of Baoyu’s nationalist subjectivity. The irony between the novel and Liang’s theory arises when Baoyu’s travel around China ends in near exile. Finally, by appropriating motifs of Jules Verne’s voyages of exploration to create a transformed “Peach Blossom Spring” and “Grand View Garden,” the second part of the novel forms its own discourse of civilization to participate in late Qing journalistic discourses of the nation. Guided by Confucian ethics, a collective national identity emerges vis-à-vis a relationship to the West on the one hand and Africa and Arabia on the other.
Unsustainable Narratives: Developmental Discourse in Late Qing Fiction
Andrew F. Jones, University of California, Berkeley
This paper explores the conflation of evolutionary biology and developmentalist discourses of national history in late Qing China. I begin with a close reading of Wu Jianren’s (1867-1910) New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji, 1905-1908), arguing that its vision of a utopian “Realm of Civilization” (Wenming jingjie) anticipates the narrative and ideological incoherence which characterizes developmental history. My analysis will focus in particular on the novel’s intertextual relations with Edward Bellamy’s (1850-1898) socialist speculative novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and Cao Xueqin’s classic 1754 masterpiece of vernacular fiction, The Story of the Stone. In drawing on both texts to craft a recursive narrative structure characterized by dream-like discontinuities and temporal aporia, Wu Jianren simultaneously stages and calls into question a China that has miraculously surpassed the West.
Indeed, the novel’s economic and technological developments are so fantastic and so utterly lacking in narrative motivation that the novel might be described as embodying a kind of ‘immaculate conception’ of national history. Finally, I account for why Jia Baoyu spends so much of his time in this Realm hunting, killing, collecting and taxonomizing examples of exotic animals and specimens of marine life. This imposition of instrumental reason on an imagined topography can be understood with reference to the writings of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao from this period, in which evolutionary biology and the colonial world order first began to be read in terms of one another.
Textual Travels and Traveling Texts: Tracing Aesthetics of the Modern Fantastic in Late Qing Science Fiction
Geraldine A. Schneider, Harvard University
This study will present the movement and adaptation of the German collection of fantastical tales The Wonderful Travels of Baron Münchhausen and how the stories, ideas and motifs contained within this text are transformed in the process of cultural, intellectual and linguistic translation. In particular, I will offer a close reading of a story by the late Qing literati Xu Nianci (Donghai Juewo, 1875-1908) entitled “Xin faluo xiansheng tan” (A New Account of Mr.Windbag) and its indebtedness to the very prolific translator Bao Tianxiao (1875-1973), the Meiji Japanese translator and writer Iwaya Sazanami (Iwaya Sueo, 1870-1933) and of course the original 18th century German text.
By focusing on the exact processes, techniques and circumstances of textual transmission and transformation, I will illuminate not only additional dimensions of meaning embedded within Xu Nianci’s early science fantasy text but also the interplay of influences that informed it, emanating from the classical tradition of fantastical writing, Meiji aesthetics as well as philosophical ideas contained within the original German tales. Throughout the analysis I ask how and why the textual transformations differ in the Japanese and Chinese texts while examining the influence of Japanese consciousness upon the late Qing literary imagination. By showing how the texts are intimately connected to each other and by taking into account the full context of intertextuality that engendered Xu’s text, I will delineate the nature of Xu Nianci’s cross-cultural poetics and show how the practice of his fiction fits together with his unique theoretical and aesthetic vision.