Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges. It sheds a new light on “May Fourth” and on the Irish Renaissance by establishing that the Irish Literary Revival (1900-1922) provided an alternative decolonizing model of resistance for the Chinese Renaissance to that provided by the western imperial center. The book also argues that Chinese May Fourth intellectuals translated Irish Revivalist plays by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O’Casey and Synge and that Chinese peasants performed these plays throughout China during the 1920s and 1930s as a form of anti-imperial resistance. Yet this literary exchange was not simply going one way, since Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics. Therefore this was a reciprocal encounter based on the circulation of Anti-colonial ideals and mutual transformation.
Table of Contents1. Introduction.- 2. Yeats and Lu Xun: Postcolonised Modernists?.- 3.How Lu Xun translated Yeats and the Irish Revival.- 4. Yeats’s Reception in China: How Chinese May Fourth Writers Translated Yeats and the Irish Revival.- 5. Tempests in Tenements and Teahouses: A Comparison of Irish Revivalist Seán O’Casey’s trilogy of plays with Lao She’s Teahouse.- 6. Spreading the News Lady Gregory’s Plays Made it all the Way to China! A Gendered Comparison of “Founding Mothers” Lady Gregory in Revivalist Ireland and Qiu Jin in China.- 7. How Was the New Woman Constructed in Revivalist Ireland and May Fourth China? A Comparison of Socialist and Feminist Writers Ding Ling and Eva Gore-Booth.- 8. Irish Revivalist J. M. Synge and Chinese May Fourth Playwright Cao Yu: ‘Boys’ Who ‘Play’ in the Postcolonised Wilderness?.- 9. Did Ye Ever Hear of the Christmas Rising by Liu Bannong? Receptions of the 1916 Irish Easter Rising in Republican era China.- 10. Conclusion
