Romanticism in China?–Its Implications for Minority Images and Aspirations
2008; Routledge; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10357820802492206
ISSN1467-8403
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I am most grateful to Mark Elvin for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, which was subsequently presented (also in a much earlier draft) at the 'International Conference on China and Chinese Studies' at Nanjing University, 26–27 May 2007, and to two anonymous readers of this paper. My thanks also to Antonia Finnane and Assa Doran for suggesting additional references. Notes 1. See Clunas (1999 Clunas, Craig. 1999. Modernity global and local: Consumption and the rise of the west. The American Historical Review, 104(5): 1497–1511. December [Google Scholar]), who remarks that the emphasis on consumption in the previous two decades had become the "prop" for an "exclusively Western" form of identity. Besides Taylor (1989 Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]; 1991 Taylor, Charles. 1991. The ethics of authenticity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]), recent unilineal discussions of the evolution of the self include Seigel (2005 Seigel, Jerrold. 2005. The idea of the self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Martin and Barresi (2006 Martin, Raymond and Barresi, John. 2006. The rise and fall of soul and self: An intellectual history of personal identity, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]). This paper deals more with notions of the modernist self than with what has been referred to as a "postmodern self" (Gergen, 1991 Gergen, Kenneth. 1991. The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life, Harper and Row: New York. [Google Scholar]; Hall, 1997 Hall Stuart, 1997 Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices Sage London [Google Scholar]) since its purpose is to highlight the "romantic" impulse that may be seen as animating both. 2. Cf. Lovejoy, 1941 Lovejoy, A. O. 1941. The meaning of romanticism for the historian of ideas. Journal of the History of Ideas, 2(3): 251–278. June [Google Scholar], pp. 251–78. 3. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the English Romantics were clearly referred to as a group, Butler (1988 Butler, Marilyn. 1988. "Romanticism in England". In Romanticism in national context, Edited by: Porter, Roy and Mikulas, Teich. 37–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]) says, while the grouping together in particular of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley occurred as late as 1940. 4. Moreover, Murphy (1993 Murphy, Peter. 1993. Romantic modernism and the Greek polis. Thesis Eleven, 34(1): 42–66. [Google Scholar]) can still argue very convincingly for a romanticism based on the construction of a "radical otherness" and cultural specificity that challenged the Augustan age of cosmopolitan, mimetic hybridity through its beliefs in originality, the authentic and the pure, the autonomous and self-generating, as the defining characteristic of Modernity. Praz (1970 Praz, Mario. 1970. The romantic agony, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) argued convincingly for romanticism as a "particular kind of sensibility at a fixed historical period". And Abrams (1973 Abrams, Meyer H. 1973. Natural supernaturalism: Tradition and revolution in literature, London and New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) noted that Shelley in 1819 had identified what he called a "distinctive spirit", a "similar tone of sentiment, imagery, and expression" in the literature of the age. 5. Verses chanted by the Immortal Lady Youying to Yang Xi, a fourth-century priest (trans. Kroll), in Donald Lopez (1966). 6. He describes as "a romantic fable" the tale of the destruction of an "original environmental innocence", a unity between humans and the world, by "economic development, the state, social stratification, and war" (Elvin, 2004 Elvin, Mark. 2004. The return of the elephants: An environmental history of China, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 108–09). 7. Pao p'u tzu, 4, 6b; in Schafer (1967 Schafer, Edward. 1967. The vermilion bird: T'ang images of the south, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]). 8. See also Lovejoy (1924 Lovejoy, A. O. 1924. On the discrimination of romanticisms. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 47 [Google Scholar]). 9. 700 new journals appeared in the eight or nine years up to 1923, according to Fitzgerald (1996 Fitzgerald, John. 1996. Awakening China: Politics, culture, and class in the nationalist revolution, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 10. Lee (1973 Lee, Ou-fan. 1973. The romantic generation of modern Chinese writers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]). 11. Haiyan Lee (2007 Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the heart: A genealogy of love in China, 1900–1950, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar], p. 82) tells us that Lin Shu also translated as many as 25 novels by Rider Haggard, in a genre of sentimental heroism! 12. I use pinyin spelling for Chinese except where following authors who use the older Wade-Giles system. 13. We should note, however, some ironic contradictions here. As Lovejoy (1924 Lovejoy, A. O. 1924. On the discrimination of romanticisms. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 47 [Google Scholar]) remarks, in its inception the "romantic"' was precisely a way of distinguishing what was then "modern", or relative and changeable, from what was seen as the "classical", or universal and unchanging. 14. Benjamin (1969a Benjamin, Walter. 1969a. "On some motifs in Baudelaire, in Walter Benjamin". In Illuminations: Essays and reflections, New York: Schocken Books. [Google Scholar]); also in many passages in his The Arcades Project (1940; 2002). 15. This is not to denigrate the depth of the feelings involved. In many ways I have barely skimmed the surface of a mighty ocean here, to which I have selected what seemed the easiest points of access. One should also see Elvin (1997, Chapter 3) on the sense of absurdity associated with the institutional and psychological crisis of the 1920s and 1930s; Fitzgerald (1996 Fitzgerald, John. 1996. Awakening China: Politics, culture, and class in the nationalist revolution, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) considers the same period from the point of view of a national awakening. See also Haiyan Lee (2007 Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the heart: A genealogy of love in China, 1900–1950, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar]). 16. Cf. Faure (1990 Faure, David. 1990. The rural economy of pre-liberation China: Trade expansion and peasant livelihood in Jiangsu and Guangdong, 1870 to 1937, Hong Kong, New York, London: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). 17. This may have been another ironic reworking of Ibsen's account in The Doll's House of how Nora leaves home for a new life, which was enormously influential in China (Fitzgerald, 1996 Fitzgerald, John. 1996. Awakening China: Politics, culture, and class in the nationalist revolution, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Haiyan Lee, 2007 Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the heart: A genealogy of love in China, 1900–1950, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar], describes it, together with Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as one of the "Bibles" of the Chinese romantic movement). It was translated into Chinese in 1918 and led to furious debates about idealism and women's status, in the light of free love understood as an escape from patriarchal structures, in particular Lu Xun's 1923 Peking University speech, 'What Happens after Nora leaves Home?' and his short story Shangshi ('Regrets for the Past') in which the hero reads The Doll's House to his beloved, who runs away from home to join him, but all their romantic ideas of individual freedom end in the disasters of real life (Fitzgerald, 1996 Fitzgerald, John. 1996. Awakening China: Politics, culture, and class in the nationalist revolution, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 18. Images of romantic heroism from the novel The Gadfly were also crucial; see Carma Hinton, Geremie Barmé and Richard Gordon, Morning Sun. (Movie, London: Long Bow Productions, 2003). 19. Fitzgerald (1996 Fitzgerald, John. 1996. Awakening China: Politics, culture, and class in the nationalist revolution, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) notes the Chinese youths who encountered utopian works of fiction in their sojourns in London, Paris and New York in the 1920s, and the much earlier translation of Edward Bellamy's (1888) Looking Backward about a young man who wakes up after a long sleep to a refashioned world. As he says, tea-shop readings and village bulletin boards meant that circulation was much higher than subscriber numbers. 20. For the "Confucian structure of feeling" she sees as preceding the "enlightenment" and "revolutionary" structures of feeling from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, she concentrates on The Peony Pavilion, The Anatomy of Love, and the mid-eighteenth century Dream of the Red Chamber, which she does see as marking a "paradigm shift" (p. 45) towards a "new mode of subjectivity – the sentimental self" (p. 49). 21. My thanks to Antonia Finnane for pointing me towards both Haiyan Lee and Fitzgerald. 22. Interestingly and in support of this, Haiyan Lee (2007 Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the heart: A genealogy of love in China, 1900–1950, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar], p. 257) mentions that as early as 1926 Gao Shan had feared traces of a revived "Confucian puritanism" in the "revolutionary repudiation of free love". 23. As noted in Thompson and Latham (2006 Thompson, Stuart and Latham, Kevin. 2006. "Introduction: Positioning consumption in contemporary China". In Consuming China: Approaches to cultural change in contemporary China, Edited by: Jacob, Klein, Kevin, Latham and Stuart, Thompson. 1–21. London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). 24. Marcuse (1966 Marcuse, Herbert. 1966. Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud, New York: Beacon Press. 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