Hong Zicheng 洪子诚
Beijing University Press (北京大学出版社), 2022.
Reviewed by: Tanvi Negi (PhD Candidate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, HYI Visiting Fellow)
World Literature in Contemporary Chinese Literature is a rich, profound and methodologically sharp exploration of the complex, layered and ambivalent relationship between contemporary Chinese literature and foreign literature during Mao and post-Mao years. This book is a collection of sixteen articles written in recent years by Hong Zicheng, one of the foremost scholarly voices on Chinese literature and literary historiography. The essays in this volume stand alone as strongly as they settle comfortably with each other giving the readers a comprehensive and yet detailed knowledge of how contemporary Chinese literature has received, resisted, appropriated, and selectively adapted foreign literature especially during the period from 1950s to 1970s. This book as Hong mentions is not only about the reception of foreign literature, about how Chinese literature during the period of its formation dealt with the “resources” of foreign literature, but it also explores how Chinese literature in the 50s had a “national plan” which included the question of how to imagine and define Chinese literature within the vision of “world literature” and to present a universal “Chinese experience”.
In the sixteen chapters Hong uses historical resources, providing archival evidence and carries out close readings of many important, influential literary works. He analyses bibliographies, translation and publication data and figures, official articles and critiques, bringing new materials to light and new ways of reading to existing materials. The chapters are structured around concrete cases, mostly focusing on Soviet literature and European writers from France and England discussing writers like Mayakovski, Yevtushenko, Stendhal, Shakespeare and others. With these case studies he illustrates how foreign literary works were canonized, how they served as a model for emulation sometimes and became a focus of controversy and critique at other times. The shifting attitudes of aesthetic and critical engagement with foreign literary works bring to light the degree of control State and its machinery exercised on national literary system. Chapter 1 analyzes a 1954 reading list published in Literary Study to reflect the state’s role in guiding Chinese engagement with Western literature. Chapters 2 and 3 explore trajectory of Soviet political poetry and enduring influence of 19th-century European literature, focusing on the reception of Yevtushenko and Stendhal. Chapter 4 critiques the lack of systematic archival research and data collection in Sino-foreign literary studies, while Chapter 5 addresses literature’s ability to express non-doctrinal, mystical experience. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Mayakovski’s fluctuating symbolic role in China, including adaptations of his play The Bedbug by Tian Han and Meng Jinghui in different eras. Chapter 8 uses the controversy over the film Dersu Uzala to illustrate how the reception of foreign cultural products is politically motivated and shaped by geopolitical narratives. Subsequent chapters analyze Alexandr Bek’s Fear and Trembling, debates on realism, socialist realism and debates around the concept of the “complete person” (完整的人物) as it was discussed in Chinese socialist literary discourse, Soviet film criticism, and the influence of poets Isakovsky and Mayakovski. Chapter 14 discusses the complex reception of Yugoslav literature, while Chapter 15 “The ‘Great Debate’ on Realism in the 1950s- Focusing on Two Collections of Essays” focuses on the 1950s debate over realism, closely analysing two key anthologies of literary essays from that period, “Essays on Socialist Realism” and “In Defence of Socialist Realism”. The last chapter provocatively titled “1964: Do We Know Less Than Shakespeare?” delves into the complexities surrounding the commemoration of Shakespeare’s 400th birth anniversary in China in 1964.
Hong Zicheng’s World Literature in Contemporary Chinese literature is an exceptional work of literary historiography and literary critique. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, comparative literature, translation studies, cold war cultural politics and modern cultural and literary discourse. It offers a powerful and strong model for how to study circulation, reception and appropriation of literary and cultural products in a historically grounded and critically nuanced way. It reveals the myriad and complex ways that contemporary Chinese literature interacted with “world literature”. The limitation of the book that Hong himself alludes to in the preface of the book is the absence of literature from Asia and Africa. Hong mentions the “Afro-Asian Conference” and stresses the importance of historical research on political and literary relations between China and the third world countries but it remains largely beyond the scope of the book. One can hope for more work in the future in this under-researched area which this book provides an essential foundation for.