‘London is blacker than lacquer’ Lao She remains revered as one of China’s great modern writers. His life and work have been the subject of volumes of critique, analysis and study. However, the four ...years the young aspiring writer spent in London between 1924 and 1929 have largely been overlooked. Dr Anne Witchard, a specialist in the modernist milieu of London between the wars, reveals Lao She’s encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce. Lao She arrived from his native Peking to the whirl of London’s West End scene—Bloomsburyites, Vorticists, avant-gardists of every stripe, Ezra Pound and the cabaret at the Cave of The Golden Calf. Immersed in the West End 1920s world of risqu413 flappers, the tabloid sensation of England’s ‘most infamous Chinaman Brilliant Chang’ and Anna May Wong’s scandalous film Piccadilly, simultaneously Lao She spent time in the notorious and much sensationalised East End Chinatown of Limehouse. Out of his experiences came his great novel of London Chinese life and tribulations—Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929). However, as Witchard reveals, Lao She’s London years affected his writing and ultimately the course of Chinese modernism in far more profound ways.
Lao She was born and raised in a time of great change and turmoil in China. Born to a poor Manchu family at the end of the Qing dynasty, and losing his father in battle, Lao She experienced many ...hardships as a child. Growing up as the Qing were falling down, one of the greatest threats to Lao She’s livelihood were the “foreigners” -- the European, American, and Japanese armies that confiscated Chinese land, goods, and terrorized its people. This ultimately embedded negative feelings towards foreign forces in Lao She, which come out in his writing. Furthermore, Lao She lived and worked in Beijing during the May Fourth Movement and was highly influenced by it. After growing up in poverty and overcoming numerous barriers to obtain an education, Lao She finally found a movement he could get behind -- one that targeted China’s greatest problems: individualism and lack of attention to the poor.
Luotuo Xiangzi, a renowned modern Chinese novel, successfully portrays a young rickshaw puller in Beijing-Xiangzi. Upon its translation into English at the end of World War II, the protagonist ...aroused much sympathy from American readers. As a best seller in the United States, the novel has been retranslated many times. A contributing factor to its popularity is the creation of the memorable protagonist. The paper investigates the role of translator positioning in constructing the character. It proposes a systematic framework that incorporates Appraisal and characterisation models. An analysis of the Chinese text and three English translations suggests that the positioning or value orientation adopted by the translators plays a significant role in their characterisation and demonstrates how a mixed model can clarify this interaction. Furthermore, the corpus-based method makes it possible to reveal patterns of translator positioning hidden in the translations.
Generally speaking, Laoshe is a writer who tended to incorporate heavy local color into his own works. However, there is an important phenomenon in China's literary history that Laoshe intentionally ...abandoned his depiction of Beijing's local color in his writing in the early period of the Anti-Japanese War and stopped writing in his most skilled Beijing dialect. It's not until around 1943 that Laoshe restarted to bring Beijing's local customs into his novel writing. In this paper, the author tries to interpret this literary phenomenon by analyzing the reasons why Laoshe reused local color in his 1940s writing. In the final part of this paper, the author concludes that the reason why Laoshe abandoned Beijing's local color in his writing in the early period of Anti-Japanese War is that he worried that the depiction of a certain region might not reflect the new image of Chinese people in Anti-Japanese War thus couldn't encourage the whole nation. However, in around 1941, with Laoshe started to regard local color
China’s Minority Fiction Knight, Sabina
World literature today,
2022, 2022-01-00, 20220101, Letnik:
96, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...they number more than 130 million, and their literature deserves study both for its political urgency and for its lyricism and philosophical power. The Chinese Communist Party continues to ...recognize the political power of writing, and literature in particular, through the PRC's official organ for writers, the Chinese Writers Association (CWA). * Who Counts as Chinese? During the Civil War of 1946 to 1949, the Chinese Communist government adopted the Soviet paradigm using the term "nationalities" (K?) to refer to ethnic groups within the empire. ...editorial control spins the book titles of Uyghur writer Abdurehim Ötkür (1923-1995).
Tradition and Modernity Yu, Shiao-ling
Asian theatre journal,
09/2019, Letnik:
36, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Introduction of Western-style drama into China in the early twentieth century produced a new dramatic genre, huaju (spoken drama), which is distinguished from traditional xiqu (musical theatre) by ...its use of spoken dialog and a more realistic portrayal of contemporary life. Many reform-minded Chinese intellectuals saw in this new drama a fitting vehicle to promote social reforms. Some of them even advocated replacing the old theatre with this more socially conscious form of theatre. While spoken drama became the favorite of the intellectual elites, traditional theatre, with its deep cultural roots and many regional forms, remained the popular form of entertainment for the masses. This article investigates the interactions between these two theatrical forms by analyzing two modern adaptations of the play Hezhu pei (Hezhu’s Match), one produced in mainland China, one in Taiwan. It will examine how the adapters utilized traditional sources to produce plays more relevant to contemporary society, and what performance techniques they employed to replace the old convention of song and dance. In addition to the old versus the new, the Chinese and Taiwanese adaptations will be compared to illuminate how social and political conditions influenced literary and artistic creations. My study will also discuss how the Taiwanese production marked the beginning of the Little Theatre Movement, which ushered in a new era in modern drama in Taiwan.
Shiao-ling Yu is an associate professor of Chinese at Oregon State University. Her research interests are Chinese drama (both classical and modern), intercultural theatre, and gender and theatre. Her anthology Chinese Drama after the Cultural Revolution was awarded a National Endowment for Arts translation fellowship. Her other publications include book chapters in edited anthologies and articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, Nativism Overseas: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers, World Theories of Theatre, Asian Theatre Journal, The China Quarterly, Chinese Literature Today, CHINOPERL, Comparative Literature Studies, and TDR/Drama Review.
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