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China’s Literary Cosmopolitans Sinica Leidensia Edited by Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel In co-operation with P.K. Bol D.R. Knechtges E.S. Rawski W.L. Idema H.T. Zurndorfer VOLUME 125 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl China’s Literary Cosmopolitans Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters Edited by Christopher Rea LEIDEN | BOSTON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data China’s literary cosmopolitans : Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the world of letters / edited by Christopher Rea. pages cm. — (Sinica Leidensia ; Volume 125) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29996-2 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29997-9 (e-book) 1. Qian, Zhongshu, 1910-1998—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Yang, Jiang, 1911—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Rea, Christopher G., editor. PL2749.C8Z596 2015 895.109’0051—dc23 2015016418 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9563 isbn 978-90-04-29996-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29997-9 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv pro- vided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Acknowledgements vii About the Contributors ix Introduction: All the World’s a Book 1 Christopher Rea 1 Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies; Or, The Serious Business of Marriage 14 Amy D. Dooling 2 “Passing Handan without Dreaming”: Passion and Restraint in the Poetry and Poetics of Qian Zhongshu 41 Yugen Wang 3 Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 65 Judith M. Amory 4 How to Do Things with Words: Yang Jiang and the Politics of Translation 87 Carlos Rojas 5 Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 109 Ronald Egan 6 The Pleasures of Lying Low: Yang Jiang and Chinese Revolutionary Culture 133 Wendy Larson 7 The Institutional Mindset: Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang on Marriage and the Academy 157 Christopher Rea 8 “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three”: Yang Jiang’s New Intimate Public 179 Jesse Field vi contents 9 The Cosmopolitan Imperative: Qian Zhongshu and “World Literature” 210 Theodore Huters Epilogue: All Will Come Out in the Washing 227 Christopher Rea Appendix: Works in English by Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang 233 Bibliography 238 Index 252 Acknowledgements Those who have already had the pleasure of reading Qian Zhongshu’s and Yang Jiang’s literary works—and those who will—now have, in this volume, sev- eral excellent reading companions. Amy Dooling, Yugen Wang, Judith Amory, Carlos Rojas, Ronald Egan, Wendy Larson, Jesse Field, and Theodore Huters shed new light on the artistic and cultural importance of these two writers. My first thanks is to them for contributing their essays, which offer revelations for specialists as well as background information essential to new readers. A list of works by Qian and Yang currently available in English appears in the appendix. This book has its origins in an academic workshop hosted in December of 2010 by the Department of Asian Studies of the University of British Columbia, entitled “Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Centennial Perspective.” I would like to thank the scholars who participated in that event, including Alexa Huang, Ji Jin, Tiziana Lioi, Yaohua Shi, Wang Yao, John Benjamin Weinstein, Zhang Enhua, and my eight fellow co-authors. Their expertise has enriched this project in many ways. In conjunction with the workshop, UBC hosted a public event to mark the centenary anniversary of both writers’ births: “Celebrating 100 Years of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang.” Two highlights of the evening were the keynote address by Professor Theodore Huters (a revised version of which appears as chapter nine) and a performance of two scenes from Yang Jiang’s 1943 comedy of manners Heart’s Desire by students from my fourth-year Chinese course at UBC. Special thanks to Ted for his talk, to Dean of Arts Gage Averill for his opening remarks, and to the players: Evgenia Stroganova, William Darlington, Robert Connolly, Adele Kurek, Andrew Zeller, and Xenia Chiu. Generous grant funding from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, as well as co-sponsorship by UBC’s Dean of Arts, Department of Asian Studies, Institute of Asian Research, Department of English, Centre for Chinese Studies, and Department of Women and Gender Studies, made these gatherings possible. I would also like to thank Stacy Barber, Edward Barss, Lonnie Chase, Xenia Chiu, Ross King, Alice Lam, Maija Norman, Evgenia Stroganova, and Stephanie Yu for their support of and assistance with both events. One of the first tangible products to emerge from the UBC workshop was an issue of the translation journal Renditions (no. 76, Autumn 2011) commemorat- ing Yang Jiang’s one hundredth birthday. My thanks again to Ted Huters, its Chief Editor, for inviting me to edit that special issue, and to Judith Amory, Yaohua Shi, and Jesse Field for their translations. viii acknowledgements Qin Higley at Brill was enthusiastic about this book from the beginning and has been a pleasure to work with. My thanks to her, and to her fellow editor Karen Cullen, for their help in making this book a reality. Christopher Rea Taipei, January 2015 About the Contributors Judith M. Amory is co-translator of Baptism by Yang Jiang (HKUP, 2007). Amy D. Dooling is associate professor of Chinese at Connecticut College. She is author of Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China (Palgrave, 2005) and editor of two anthologies on Writing Women in Modern China (Columbia, 1998, 2005). Ronald Egan is professor and chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. He is translator of Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters by Qian Zhongshu (Harvard, 1998) and author of The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) (Cambridge, 1985, 2009), Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Harvard, 1994), Qian Zhongshu’s Reading of the Classics: An Analysis of the Underlying Principles of Guanzhuibian (bilingual ed.) (National Tsing Hua, 1998), The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (2006), and The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China (Harvard, 2014). Jesse Field is translator of several works by Yang Jiang (Renditions, 2011) and author of the dissertation “Writing Lives in China: The Case of Yang Jiang” (Minnesota, 2012). Theodore Huters is professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles and chief editor of the journal Renditions. He is author of Qian Zhongshu (Twain, 1982) and Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Hawai‘i, 2005) and editor of several works, including China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition by Wang Hui (Harvard, 2006). Wendy Larson is professor of modern Chinese literature and film and vice provost for Portland programs at the University of Oregon. She is author of Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography (Duke, 1991), Women and Writing in Modern China (Stanford, 1998), From Ah Q to Lei Feng: x about the contributors Freud and the Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (Stanford, 2009), and a forthcoming study of Zhang Yimou. Christopher Rea is associate professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), co-editor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–65 (UBC Press and HKUP, 2015), and edi- tor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu (Columbia, 2011). Carlos Rojas is associate professor of Chinese cultural studies, women’s studies, and arts of the moving image at Duke University. He is author of The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard, 2008), The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Harvard, 2010), and Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Reform in Modern China (Harvard, 2015). He is co-editor of, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford, 2013) and Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (Routledge, 2009), and, with David Der-wei Wang, Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke, 2007). He is also translator of The Four Books (Grove/Atlantic, 2015) and Lenin’s Kisses (Grove/Atlantic, 2012) by Yan Lianke and, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, Brothers: A Novel by Yu Hua (Pantheon, 2009). Yugen Wang is associate professor of Chinese at the University of Oregon. He is author of Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song (Harvard, 2011) and translator of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Sanlian, 1999).