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ASIA-PACIFIC AND LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
Asian English
Histories, Texts, Institutions
Edited by
Myles Chilton
Steve Clark
Yukari Yoshihara
Asia-Pacific and Literature in English
Series Editors
Shun-liang Chao, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
Steve Clark, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Tristanne Connolly, St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Alex Watson, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
Laurence Williams, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan
The Palgrave Asia-Pacific and Literature in English series presents exciting
and innovative academic research on Asia-Pacific interactions with Anglo-
phone literary tradition. Focusing on works from the voyages of Captain
Cook to the early twentieth century, it also considers previous encoun-
ters in the early modern period, as well as reception history continuing
to the present day. Encompassing China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India,
and Australasia, monographs and essay collections in this series display
the complexity, richness and global influence of Asia-Pacific responses
to English literature, focusing on works in English but also considering
those from other linguistic traditions. The series addresses the imperial
and colonial origins of English language and literature in the region, and
highlights other forms of reciprocal encounter, circulation, and mutual
transformation, as part of an interdependent global history.
More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16211
Myles Chilton · Steve Clark · Yukari Yoshihara
Editors
Asian English
Histories, Texts, Institutions
Editors
Myles Chilton Steve Clark
Nihon University University of Tokyo
Tokyo, Japan Tokyo, Japan
Yukari Yoshihara
University of Tsukuba
Tsukuba, Japan
ISSN 2524-7638 ISSN 2524-7646 (electronic)

Asia-Pacific and Literature in English
ISBN 978-981-16-3512-0 ISBN 978-981-16-3513-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

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Acknowledgments
This collection of essays started as an extended conversation which then

took on a more organized form in a series of panels at the International
Academic Forum’s Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities conference
held from 30 March to 1 April 2018 in Kobe, Japan. As the book was
taking shape, we convened another panel for the Liberlit conference on 1
June 2019 at Seikei University in Tokyo, Japan. The editors wish to thank
the conference organizers for giving us space to nurture our project, and
the conference participants for their valuable feedback. We would also like
to express our gratitude to Sara Crowley Vigneau, Leana Li, and Connie
Li at Palgrave Macmillan for allowing us to proceed to book form.
The preparation of any edited volume is always a labor of love. All such
projects experience hiccups and roadblocks: we had our share, and while
many were joyous—babies born, promotions earned, academic achieve-
ments recognized—there have also been setbacks, not the least of which
is the still-spreading Covid pandemic. We three editors of Asian English
would like to thank our contributors for not only the excellence of their
work, but also their immense patience as we made our way through the
process of assembling this book.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Redefining English in Asia

for the Twenty-First Century 1
Myles Chilton, Steve Clark, and Yukari Yoshihara
2 British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised,
and Resurrected 17
Ou Li
3 Teaching and Learning English Language During
the Early British Rule in India 43
Parimala V. Rao
4 The Crisis and the Challenge: South Korean English
Studies in the Age of Digital Transformation 69
Jihee Han
5 Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and Its
Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy in East
Asia 85
Hiromi Ochi
6 Cultural Diplomacy, Literature(s) in English
and Creative Writing in Cold War Asia 107
Yukari Yoshihara
vii
viii CONTENTS
7 Stephen Spender and Japanese Atomic Bomb Poetry

in the 1950s 127
Hajime Saito
8 Unfree Association: On Philippine Creative Writing
and US Cultural Diplomacy 145
Conchitina Cruz
9 The Crisis in the Humanities: A Perspective
from the Middle East 165
James Hodapp
10 De-, and Re-Centering: Teaching Dystopian Texts
to Emirati Students 185
Firas A. J. Al-Jubouri
11 The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Literary
Canon 209
L. Ashley Squires
12 A New “Westernism” in the Intercultural Humanities 235
Michael O’Sullivan
13 Global English’s Centers of Consecration 253
Myles Chilton
14 Asian English in Arnold, Mill and Newman 271
Steve Clark
15 Literature and the Humanities in the Age
of Technological Disruption 297
John W. P. Phillips
Index 321
Notes on Contributors
Firas A. J. Al-Jubouri is an assistant professor of English and communi-

cation in the department of General Education at the University of Doha
for Science and Technology, author of Milestones on the Road to Dystopia
(2014) and several journal articles, including “The end was contained
in the beginning”: “Orwell’s Kyauktada and Oceania” (2016) in George
Orwell Studies. He has taught English literature, language, IELTS and
academic writing at several academic institutions in the Gulf region and
in the UK. His areas of research and teaching interests are dystopian
fiction, the twentieth-century English novels and comparative literature,
namely the modern Arabic novel. He has a Ph.D. in English Literature
from Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Myles Chilton received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and
is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at
Nihon University. He is the author of English Studies Beyond the ‘Center’:
Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English (Routledge 2016);
and co-author of The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language
and Literature (Routledge 2015), Deterritorializing Practices in Literary
Studies (Contornos 2014), and World Literature and the Politics of the
Minority (Rawat 2013). He has also written about relationships between
contemporary world literature and global cities in Literary Cartographies:
Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (Palgrave 2014), and in such
journals as Comparative Critical Studies, The Journal of Narrative Theory,
and Studies in the Literary Imagination.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Steve Clark is a professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and

Sociology, and in the Department of English Language and Literature,
the University of Tokyo. Clark received both a B.A. and Ph.D. from
Cambridge University, then was a British Academy post-doc and fellow of
the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London. His many
publications include Paul Ricoeur (Routledge 1990), Travel-Writing and
Empire (ZED 1999), Reception of Blake in the Orient (Continuum 2006),
and Asian Crossings: Travel-Writing on China, Japan and South-East Asia
(Hong Kong UP 2008). His most recent book, co-edited with Tristanne
Connolly, is British Romanticism in a European Perspective (Palgrave
2015).
Conchitina Cruz is a professor in the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman,
where she teaches literature and creative writing. She has a Ph.D. in
English from State University of New York (SUNY) Albany. Her books
of poetry include Dark Hours (which won the National Book Award for
Poetry in the Philippines), elsewhere held and lingered, and There Is No
Emergency.
Jihee Han is a professor of English at Gyeongsang National University,
where she has been teaching modern English poetry. Her research inter-
ests are modern English poetry, comparative world literature, Korean
literature and culture, feminism, translation, and cultural technology
and industry. She has published a number of journal articles on high
modernism in arts and published such monographs as A Companion to
Ten Modern Korean Poets, Korean Pop-culture and the Cult of True Girl-
hood, Sonyeo, Harlem Renaissance: The Birth of the New Negro, and Now
Is the Time to Read English Poetry. She edited and contributed an essay
to The World Literature and the Politics of the Minority and translated
Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. Currently, she is conducting an
international joint research project on global humanities studies.
James Hodapp is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern
University in Qatar in the Liberal Arts Program. Previously he was an
assistant professor in the Department of English at the American Univer-
sity of Beirut. Most recently, he edited the collection Afropolitan Liter-
ature as World Literature (Bloomsbury). He has also published widely
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
in numerous journals including ARIEL, Journal of Commonwealth Liter-

ature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, African Literature Today,
Research in African Literatures, English in Africa, and Critical Arts.
Ou Li is an associate professor in the Department of English at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Keats and
Negative Capability (Continuum 2009), “Keats’s Afterlife in Twentieth-
Century China” (in English Romanticism in East Asia: A Romantic
Circles PRAXIS Volume), “Romantic, Rebel, and Reactionary: The Meta-
morphosis of Byron in Twentieth-Century China” (in British Roman-
ticism in Asia, Palgrave, 2019), and “Two Chinese Wordsworths: The
Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China” (in Romantic
Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts, Routledge,
2019). Her research interests include Romantic poetry and Sino-British
cultural/literary relations.
Michael O’Sullivan is a professor in the Department of English at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has worked in universities in
Ireland, the UK, America, Japan and Hong Kong. He has published
widely in the humanities and in the fields of literature, philosophy and
education studies. His publications include The Humanities and the Irish
University: Anomalies and Opportunities (Manchester UP 2014); The
Humanities in Contemporary Chinese Contexts (Springer 2016; with E.
Chan); The Future of English in Asia (Routledge 2014; with C. Lee and
D. Huddart); Academic Barbarism, Universities and Inequality (Palgrave
2016); and Irish Expatriatism, Language and Literature: The Problem of
English (Palgrave 2018).
Hiromi Ochi a Ph.D. in American literature, is a professor at Senshu
University. Her interest is in the intellectual trajectory of Southern Agrar-
ians/New Critics and Cold War cultural diplomacy. Her publications
include: Southern Moment of Modernism: Southern Poets and the Cold War
(Kenkyusha 2012 [in Japanese]); Truman Capote: His Life and Liter-
ature (Bensei Shuppan 2005 [in Japanese]); “The Reception of Amer-
ican Literature in Japan during the Occupation” in the Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford UP 2017); and “Democratic Book-
shelf: American Libraries in Occupied Japan” in Pressing the Fight: Print,
Propaganda, and the Cold War, eds. G. Barnhisel and C. Turner (U of
Massachusetts P 2010).
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
John W. P. Phillips teaches in the Department of English Language and

Literature at the National University of Singapore. He has published on
aesthetics, critical theory, deconstruction, linguistics, literature, military
technology, philosophy, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and urbanism.
He is author of Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory, co-
author of Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Mili-
tary Technology: Technicities of Perception. He is co-editor of several
volumes, including Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and
Global Processes; Beyond Description: Space, Historicity, Singapore; and The
New Encyclopaedia Project, Volume I, Problematizing Global Knowledge
(2006), and Volume II, Megacities (2011). Among recent activities, he is
editor of Derrida Now (Edinburgh UP 2015).
Parimala V. Rao teaches the history of education at the Zakir Husain
Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the
founding member and coordinator of Research Interest Group: History of
Education of The Comparative Education Society of India. Twice she was
a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Education, London. She is the author
of Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism: Discrimination, Education, and
Hindutva (Orient Black Swan 2010), and Beyond Macaulay: Education
in India 1780–1860 (Routledge 2020). She has edited New Perspectives
in the History of Indian Education (Orient Black Swan 2014), and is one
of the editors of the Encyclopaedia of Asian Educators (Routledge 2021).
Hajime Saito is an associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities
and Social Sciences at University of Tsukuba. He has been reading
Joseph Conrad novels and also studying why many Japanese readers loved
reading English literature when Japan was an empire. Now he focuses on
the politics of English and American literary studies in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. His publications include Teikoku Nihon no Eibungaku (English
Literary Studies in Imperial Japan) (Jimbun Shoin 2006 [in Japanese]);
and “Embracing Hiroshima”, Journal of East-West Thought (September
2016).
L. Ashley Squires received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at
Austin in 2012, and is now an assistant professor of Humanities at the
New Economic School in Moscow. Her prior research covers the intersec-
tions of American literary and religious history and the medical human-
ities, with a particular focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Her current work brings the digital humanities to bear on the
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
reception of American literature outside of the United States and on the

reception of naturalist authors in the former Soviet Union. She is the
author of Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress, and Christian Science
(Indiana UP 2017), and articles appearing in Book History, Studies in the
Novel, and American Literary Realism.
Yukari Yoshihara is an associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities
and Social Sciences at University of Tsukuba and a board member of the
Asian Shakespeare Association. Her publications include “Toward Recip-
rocal Legitimation between Shakespeare’s Works and Manga” (2020),
“Tacky Shakespeare in Japan” (2013), “The First Japanese Adaptation
of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism” (2012), and the “Intro-
duction” to English Studies in Asia (2007). Her current projects are on
Anglophone literature in Cold War Asia and Shakespeare and/in Japanese
popular culture.
List of Tables
Table 11.1 Countries represented in the sample 215

Table 11.2 Top 25 “Worldly” Authors and Texts by Number
of Regions Originating Searches 217
Table 11.3 Top 25 “Worldly” Authors and Texts by the Sum
of the Scores for the Top 5 Regions 218
Table 11.4 Top 25 “Worldly” Authors and Texts by Combined
Z-score 220
Table 11.5 “Migratory” British Texts with High Searchership in Asia 222
Table 11.6 “Migratory” American Texts with High Searchership
in Asia 227
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Redefining English in Asia

for the Twenty-First Century
Myles Chilton, Steve Clark, and Yukari Yoshihara
Anglophone literary studies have a long though not at all straightforward

history in Asia. A well-established post-colonial critique holds that English
literary study was introduced first in India and then throughout the
British Empire as a form of indirect control, and at times open coercion,
with the ultimate aim of producing a collaborationist elite who identified
with the imperial regime. In her contribution to this volume, Parimala
Rao tempers this view, observing that in the colonial period, many Indians
didn’t need to be coerced because learning “English” promised both
M. Chilton (B)
Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan
e-mail: chilton.myles.kent@nihon-u.ac.jp
S. Clark
University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Y. Yoshihara
University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
e-mail: yoshihara.yukari.fp@u.tsukuba.ac.jp
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
M. Chilton et al. (eds.), Asian English,
Asia-Pacific and Literature in English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7_1
2 M. CHILTON ET AL.
language study and an education in science and mathematics. In Japan

during the Meiji period, reformers realized that learning not just English
but other subjects in English would be key to resisting British and Amer-
ican colonial pressures. Thus it was that the foundation of Cambridge
English Tripos was predated by study of the English at the University
of Tokyo by forty years.1 Rui Yang observes that after over 150 years
of absorption, “Western-styled modern higher education systems have
become well established throughout East Asia,”2 indicating how a similar
pattern played out in several Asian sites, with English language, literature,
and the humanities as a collective discipline spreading and establishing
themselves in modernizing colonial and post-colonial nation states. The
imposition of English in Asia brought with it Euro-American versions of
humanistic learning that have developed into a multivalent discourse of
institutional formation and identity.
All of which is to say that the idea that the discipline is simply a
recent foreign import in Asia can be contested. Our choice of title—Asian
English rather than “English in Asia,” or a phrase like “the spread of
English into and throughout Asia”—is meant to provoke (1) acceptance
of English as an Asian language, (2) recognition that English literary study
currently enjoys a relatively healthy presence in Asian universities, and (3)
acknowledgment that English serves in many Asian university systems as
a partner to or even lynchpin of the humanities. We also seek to call the
attention of the Anglo-American “center” of the discipline to the fact of
Asian English, to give weight to James F. English’s recent observation
that the “future expansion of English studies will mostly occur outside
the discipline’s traditional Anglophone and European base,” therefore
“it is time for those of us at the presumptive center of things to begin
paying more attention to the forms our discipline is taking at these sites of
rapid expansion.”3 Amid Anglo-American academics’ fears for the health
of the discipline there is a perplexingly persistent blind spot covering a
vast expanse of the planet. Taking the trouble to peer into this neglected
immensity one sees not only the well-known truth that the numbers of
English language and literature learners in the traditional Anglophone
regions (Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, and so on) have already
become a minority, but also that the global economic and demographic
balance is undeniably tilting toward Asia, not least because approximately
half the population of India are English-speakers, while the estimated
figure of 100 million Chinese speakers of English will rise exponentially
over coming decades.
1 INTRODUCTION: REDEFINING ENGLISH IN ASIA … 3
In our subtitle Histories, Texts, Institutions the middle term holds

the first and third in a balance: texts represent time and are present
in time; the institutions of English consecrate its history as a discipline
and regulate which texts best represent it. This book in part takes a cue
from Jeffrey J. Williams’s edited volume The Institution of Literature in
focusing on what people do in English literature departments, and on
their self-defining strategies. We also assume that the institution “gen-
erates what we call literature, or more modestly, that the question of
literature is inseparable from our institutional practices and locations.”4
We also take a cue from Sarah Brouillette’s analysis of the history of
UNESCO’s support for literature. By focusing on specific institutions, she
argues, critical discourse can be grounded in the political economies of
nation states, meaning it can account for the “the foundational structures
of our societies” beyond the Bourdieusian field of cultural production
and “the relations internal to a restricted literary field.”5 The focus on
institutions thus allows us to consider the main audience for Anglophone
literature: students, and their teachers, and their often competing inter-
ests and motivations in pursuit of education in response to layered and
mingled socio-economic pressures. To take an example, particular Asian
localities may not share the dissenting, progressive counter-cultural views
that tend to be prized in Anglo-American English departments. This
presents faculty educated in the Anglosphere with a challenge, as Firas Al-
Jubouri’s chapter shows. How then, to teach it? What may appear radical
in a Western context can appear irresponsible in a local Asian context. The
history of English in Asia is in many ways a history of adjustments made
in the classroom and at the departmental level.
From this perspective, each chapter contributes to a common frame-
work of debate, ranging from the genealogies of textual critique and
institutionalized forms of teaching of English language and literature in
Asia from the nineteenth century to the present, to examinations of how
its present options and possible future directions relate to these histor-
ical contexts. Rather than assume that Asian English and Anglo-American
English are stand-alone conceptual entities, we conceive of both as disci-
plinary formations that could, and perhaps should be pluralized. And yet,
we also want to shift the Anglo-American gaze—in the material and affec-
tive senses, as they manifest themselves in any region of the world—to
Asia, to see the discipline of Anglophone literary studies from an alter-
native Asian point of view, while remaining conscious of the extent to
which Anglo-American disciplinary histories subtend the globalization of
4 M. CHILTON ET AL.
English studies. Assuming a unitary Asian perspective is indeed prob-

lematic, as along with flattening and totalizing the continent’s limitless
variety, it runs the Orientalizing risk of casting “the Asian perspective” as
that of a receiver, an accepter of flows from outside. Alas, the latter has
become something of a truism. Many accept that the core of English as
an academic discipline lies in certain prominent Anglo-American universi-
ties. Rui Yang notes how “The Western models of the university and the
accompanying Eurocentric knowledge development have long been only
in one direction as far as East Asia is concerned, that is, from the West to
the East. Indigenous knowledge... has been largely absent in East Asia’s
higher education curriculum.”6 Accepting this situation means adopting
a kind of cultural amnesia with regard to certain stubborn historical
facts, including—to take but two examples—that the Confucian tradition
is the world’s oldest humanities tradition, and that India’s educational
institutions long predate those of Europe or America. As Steve Clark’s
chapter points out, Nalanda’s foundation in the fifth century comes at
least 500 years before that of Oxford. A more productive approach is
to trouble the West–East flow by following cross-currents and sudden
disruptive change. Yang argues that policies based on this “antiquated”
divide of knowledge “are doomed to be ineffective, even misleading,”7 an
argument Michael O’Sullivan takes up in his chapter in this volume. Such
anachronistic divisions prevent us from seeing that globalization presents
liberal arts educational projects in both East Asia and the West with similar
challenges; as Insung Jung argues, these include “lack of understanding of
the concepts of liberal arts education on the part of policy-makers, parents
and students, the long-standing preference for specialized vocational and
professional education, a perceived mismatch between the aims of liberal
education and the expectations of graduates by employers, and, as a
consequence of these, a lack of coherence in policy-making and limited
funding and political support.”8 It is encouraging to note, however, that
despite these negative assumptions, liberal arts programs are still being
established in Asia.
This volume’s central argument is that the establishment of Anglo-
phone literature in Asia did not simply “happen”: there were extra-literary
and-academic forces at work, inserting and domesticating in Asian univer-
sities both the English language and Anglo-American literature, and their
attendant cultural and political values. Examining the various kinds of
political intervention—US government agencies, funding bodies, univer-
sity administrations, for instance—which have influenced the Asian spread
of Anglophone literature has heretofore been relatively untouched schol-

arly territory, in contrast to the extensive scholarship on the institutional
development of the discipline in British and American universities, or on
the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe.
In many ways, Asian English takes its inspiration and direction from
English Studies in Asia, edited by Masazumi Araki, Chee Seng Lim,
Ryuta Minami, and Yukari Yoshihara (and to which Hajime Saito also
contributed a chapter). As Yoshihara observes in her introduction, English
Studies in Asia is perhaps the first volume to attempt to understand the
varied histories of the discipline in the region. That book itself an exten-
sion of and response to Araki’s project of the same name which focused on
the institutional marginalization of English literary studies in Japan in the
face of pressures to teach more “practical” English. This pedagogical turn
revealed to Araki a need to open up dialogues with other Asian English
literature scholars. What he found was salutary: a keen interest in “re-
examining the meaning and future possible directions of English studies in
its relation to our own positionality and situatedness... [because] English
literature studies as an institutionalized discipline of higher education has
not been established in all Asian countries in the same way.’”9 Yoshi-
hara, for instance, argues for analysis of Japan “alongside the colonial and
perhaps neo-colonial contexts of other Asian countries,”10 rather than
comparing the Japanese situation with that of the Anglophone countries.
This inter-Asian perspective allows for dialogues between monolingual
and multilingual Asian sites, as well as considerations of the differing
colonial legacies and contemporary statuses of English. This perspective
is shared both by Asian nations with a history of direct colonial rule and
others that have experienced modes of neo-colonial influence (such as
Japan’s post-WWII occupation by the US). India would obviously be
an example of the former, and as Svati Joshi writes in the introduction
to Rethinking English, pedagogical activity in Indian English depart-
ments assumes for English literature a set of liberal universalisms and
a reflexive normativity, while its critical methods become an orthodoxy
denying “any possibility of connecting the English text with our material
world.”11 Thus, rather than formulating an account of English studies
in India, Joshi argues for the need to “understand and analyze the role
of English in our history and cultural formation, for we believe it that
it has an importance not only for our academic activity but also for an
understanding of the present moment.”12
6 M. CHILTON ET AL.
In the decade and a half since the publication of English Studies in

Asia, the intensified globalization of English studies forces a reckoning
with a broader geo-historical context, necessitating the recalibration of
the Anglo-American tradition, along with consideration of the increasing
commodification and “branding” of higher education. In other words,
the prestige of US and UK universities, rather than waning in a wider
field of educational opportunity, has only become stronger (increasingly
dependent though they are on income from foreign students). As Michael
O’Sullivan, David Huddart, and Carmen Lee observe in their introduc-
tion to The Future of English in Asia, economic globalization strengthens
the association of the English language with “power, prestige and the
perpetuation of elitism in Asian contexts.”13 O’Sullivan, Huddart, and
Lee seek to “examine the deeper cultural, psychological and emotional
effects of the newly styled globalized English in the various multilingual
Asian contexts,” in the recognition of the geographical distance of Asia
from the ‘home’ of English.”14 This is echoed by Mukul Saxena and
Tope Omoniyi, who note that along with asymmetrical relations of capital
in globalization, various kinds of prestige remain attached to various
languages, with World or Global Englishes centered in the US. While
America’s economic dominance may be waning, global English continues
in its trek across frontiers to evoke its Anglo-American origins.15 The
same could be said for the choice of which Anglophone literature to teach,
and how to teach it.
But while Saxena and Omoniyi believe that the spread of World
or Global Englishes may never completely escape some sort of devel-
opmental relationship with British or American Englishes, O’Sullivan,
Huddart, and Lee assert—in echo of James English—“whatever future
English has will inevitably be shaped by its fate in Asia.”16 The indige-
nization of several strains of English in Asia (in India, Singapore, and the
Philippines, for instance) indicates to them that “the future of English in
Asia seems likely to break free of its past.”17 Guiding this future, they
believe, is the growing power of China, a factor which surely must be
taken into account now and into the future.
While Asian English follows a rough chronology, the structure is other-
wise purposely loose. As we focus on Asian reception and interplay with
the circulation of Anglo-American outflows, we make no attempt to
“cover” all of Asia, or to notions of geographical or historical “complete-
ness” or to constituting a unified “Asian” perspective. In fact, one of our
underlying positions is to treat any such project with suspicion—just as it

is to think of a unified Western or Anglo-American or national perspective.
In “British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised, and Resur-
rected,” Ou Li’s focus on twentieth-century China’s dynamic assimilation
of British Romanticism illustrates the complexities of Asian reception
of English texts and aesthetic movements. By examining several key
aspects of British Romanticism, namely, radicalism, self-expressiveness,
and naturalism, Li then explores how each had been treated with drasti-
cally contradictory stances in China, along with the conflicting ideologies
that took turns dominating the Chinese stage. Li’s chapter also discusses
the significance of the intermediary of Japanese, German, and Soviet
sources in the Chinese reception of British Romanticism, and how being
twice removed from the original might have contributed to the emphasis
on what is without instead of what is within British Romantic poetry.
Despite the instrumentalist approach China took to British Romanticism,
Li’s chapter concludes with a discussion of the profound legacy British
Romanticism has left in China.
As mentioned earlier, the introduction of English education into Asia is
taken to be a tool of British imperial coercion, or as Gauri Viswanathan’s
Masks of Conquest suggests (in the Indian context), as a way to mask
economic and social exploitation. Viswanathan’s view (along with similar
claims by Edward Said) has been criticized for overlooking the role
Indians played in both resisting and demanding English education;
indeed, as Ania Loomba points out, reformers and nationalists opposed to
the Raj nevertheless supported English education for Indians.18 Parimala
Rao’s essay, “Teaching and Learning English Language during the Early
British Rule in India,” takes up this challenge to the assertion that British
colonial rule imposed English language and literature upon Indians as
a means of controlling the subject population as well as to demonstrate
its superiority as a ruling class. Also, as mentioned earlier, in the Indian
context the term “English education” meant a curriculum comprised of
English literature along with sciences, social sciences and mathematics,
through English as a medium of instruction. Even when these modern
subjects were taught through the medium of Indian vernaculars, along
with English as a second language, it was referred to as “English educa-
tion.” Rao’s chapter offers an intimate and thorough historical tracing
of India’s “English education” from its informal origins at the hands of
British officers and colonial administrators to the more politically, socially,
8 M. CHILTON ET AL.
and culturally complex developments occasioned by its establishment in

more formal, institutionalized settings.
In “The Crisis and the Challenge: South Korean English Studies in the
Age of Digital Transformation,” Jihee Han addresses the changes South
Korean English literature faculty face inside and outside academia. Amid
government pressures to teach practical English and a student body made
up of digital nomads reluctant to read “difficult” literary texts—namely,
those of T. S. Eliot—Han wonders if the changes heralded by these devel-
opments can be construed as potentially positive rather than negative.
Through tracing the rise and fall of T. S. Eliot’s literary status as part of
a survey of the history of South Korean English studies as a story of the
decline of Anglocentric aesthetic values, then watching the subsequent
rise of Global English and distinctively Korean perspectives in an age of
digital technology, Han offers the “transmutable imagination” of “the
nomadic minority” as a strategy for reinventing Asian English.
The next four chapters reposition the analytical lens to trace the
expansion of English texts and English studies from the US to Asia,
demonstrating that Anglophone texts did not simply drift around the
globe to be picked up by chance by interested Asian readers. These essays
can be read as case studies of how cultural patronage, particularly that
bestowed by the US State Department, was deployed in the establish-
ment of American literary studies in Asia at the beginning of the Cold
War. So rapid and effective was this effort that it obscures the relative
newness of the discipline of American studies.
In “Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and its Significance
in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy in East Asia,” Hiromi Ochi, contextu-
alizing the role of American studies in the larger scheme of Cold War
cultural diplomacy of the US State Department, sets the scene by tracing
the effects of the inaugural School for American Studies in Salzburg,
Austria, in 1947. Crucial to the US strategy of disseminating American
culture and values abroad was the formation of American studies as a
legitimate academic subject. The first Seminar in 1947 was a model for
this dissemination, inspiring seminars and lectures first in Japan, then
similar projects in South Korea and Taiwan. Ochi’s chapter focuses on
how American studies circulated in areas devastated by World War II,
how it was expected to contribute to the intellectual redevelopment of
post-war Japan and other East Asian countries, and how it played a part
in constituting the “Cold War consensus.”
In “Cultural Diplomacy, Literature(s) in English and Creative Writing

in Cold War Asia,” Yukari Yoshihara, while analyzing how Anglophone
literature and Creative Writing programs were weapons of the cultural
Cold War in Asia, demonstrates that they also created and produced dissi-
dent voices directed against American cultural hegemony. Charles Burton
Fahs (1908–1980), the Rockefeller Foundation director of Humani-
ties Division (1946–1961), was one of the central figures involved
in Stanford-Tokyo University American Studies Seminars (discussed in
Ochi’s chapter) and Creative Writing programs in Asia. The latter,
launched with Wallace Stegner’s lecture tour to Asia (1950–51) during
the Korean War, was part of a larger project aimed at containing anti-
Americanism. Yoshihara examines N.V.M. Gonzalez, a main aide of
Stegner’s lecture tour in South East Asia, and founder of the Creative
Writing Program at the University of the Philippines, as a case of the
fissured response to the hegemony of American English in Cold War Asia,
particularly the increasing dominance of English in world literature.
In “Stephen Spender and Japanese Atomic Bomb Poetry in the
1950s,” Hajime Saito focuses on English poet Stephen Spender’s writ-
ings on the Hiroshima atomic bombing and his interactions with Japanese
poets’ opposition to nuclear weapons. Spender (1909–1995), once better
known for his poems engaged with social injustice and class struggle in
the 1930s, is now remembered primarily as an anti-communist cultural
agent during the Cold War, and for his commitment to a literary maga-
zine, Encounter (1953–1991), subsidized by the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, a front organization of the CIA. However, his responses to
Japanese atomic bomb literature have received minimal scrutiny. Also
unacknowledged are reactions to his views from Japanese poets and
Japanese scholars of English literature. This chapter investigates the ways
in which Spender attempts to de-politicize issues surrounding nuclear
weapons when he asks Japanese poets to “withhold utterance” against
nuclear weapon experimentation—such as the Bikini Incident—and to
“care about” things “poetically,” to engage with the “social disease”
through “a renewal of creativeness.”
In “Unfree Association: On Philippine Creative Writing and US
Cultural Diplomacy,” Conchitina Cruz, in order to address the ques-
tion “Does cultural diplomacy work?”, examines the International Writing
Program (IWP) based in the University of Iowa as a site where US cultural
diplomacy and Philippine Creative Writing converge. Cruz studies the
IWP in relation to the oldest writers’ workshop in the Philippines, the
10 M. CHILTON ET AL.
Silliman University Writers Workshop (SUNWW), which was patterned

by its founders after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW). Demonstrating
how SUNNW’s institutional history, particularly its ties to the IWP and
IWW, tends to be written in the language of cultural diplomacy and apart
from the history of the Philippines under US colonization, this chapter
draws connections between this decontextualized view of US-Philippine
literary relations and the de-historicized creative writing pedagogy under-
girded by American New Criticism that the SUNWW is known for. The
impact of the IWP on Philippine creative writing shows how a program
of cultural diplomacy aids in cultivating cultural climates predisposed
to advancing geopolitical relations favorable to the US, especially when
cultural diplomacy is regarded as an extended project whose outcomes
manifest over time.
The programmatic creation of American literary studies in Asia also
manifested itself in the creation of regional universities based upon the
American model. Whether in such institutions as American University
in Beirut or Northwestern University’s Qatar campus, the expansion of
English is explicitly tied to the broader project of US expansionism—
with many of its problems intact. In “The Crisis in the Humanities: A
Perspective from the Middle East,” James Hodapp notes that the widely
acknowledged “crisis” in the humanities extends beyond the US to many
understudied, and arguably misunderstood, regions. Hodapp relates his
first-hand experience at the two aforementioned Anglophone universities,
buttressed with curricular analyses, enrollment figures, faculty hiring, and
extant data on the region’s humanities programs, to provide a glimpse
of US influence and local conditions in the Middle East. Mediated by
the ever-present specter of colonial history, recent Western military and
economic projects in the region, and the implications of English’s role
in globalization, Hodapp argues that in many ways the crisis now being
reckoned with in the West has been a reality in the Middle East for
decades, yet is also deflected by newer and wealthier humanities programs
in English (and other languages) tailored to meet the local education
market.
In “De-, and Re-Centering: Teaching Dystopian Texts to Emirati
Students,” Firas A. J. Al-Jubouri examines the tensions inherent in
teaching dystopian texts (in this case, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) while considering the significance of
tradition and culture in the Arab world. English literature teachers in the
Gulf Cooperation Council often feel pressured to follow curricula set by
the Ministry of Education, avoiding the potential for controversy in favor

of canonical stability. Others, however, seek to provoke, or in Al-Jubouri’s
formulation, de- and/or re-center certain ideas, themes, plots, or mean-
ings to address the cultural politics to meet the learner’s needs in the
non-Anglophone setting. Al-Jubouri’s larger point is that English litera-
ture can be received in ways that “distort” or “destabilize” Anglocentric
ideas, a thorny and pressing endeavor that necessitates striding worlds and
bridging cultural divides for both students and teachers.
In another take on Anglophone textual reception, L. Ashley Squires’s
“The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Literary Canon,” addresses
the role digital analysis can play in understanding the circulation and
reception of world literature, particularly in the Asian context, where a
sizable Asian Anglophone readership offers a potential audience for world
literature as a pedagogical framework in Asian institutions. Squires argues
that reconfiguring our understanding of a literary canon around patterns
and histories of reception, rather than production, runs almost imme-
diately into immense problems of scale and specificity. Scholars around
the world may understand how the canon is understood and taught in
their particular locale, but academic gestures toward a shared global canon
are necessarily speculative and provisional. Squires’s chapter demonstrates
how big data analytics can help with this problem. Using Google Trends,
Squires look at patterns of searchership for texts represented in major
Anglophone literature anthologies, enabling comparisons of the way the
Anglophone canon is represented elsewhere around the world. While
many canonical Anglophone works can be truly considered “worldly,” the
data also reveals “migratory texts” whose readership seems to have moved
from its original site of production to another location. But because
this data cannot tell us why the readership for these texts has moved,
such cases stand as provocative calls for further research. Squires’s ulti-
mate argument is that while big data produces what Franco Moretti calls
“Distant Reading” or Matthew Jockers calls “Macroanalysis,” it must be
supplemented by more traditional methods.
In “The New ‘Westernism’ in the Intercultural Humanities,” Michael
O’Sullivan asks how we are to understand the humanities—a field that
more than any other must be mindful of differences—within global
university strategies and systems of evaluation that rank universities
according to criteria that lead to ever greater homogeneity. The process
requires an openness to the difference of Asian humanities, a field that for
Leo Ou-Fan Lee must have “Asian humanistic scholars” and “all human-
istic scholars interested in Asia” re-examining and redefining Western
philosophical theory (2010). Jana S. Rošker (2016) argues that inter-
cultural research that includes Chinese philosophy must involve the
“intercultural relativization of the contents based on specific requirements
of research in the Chinese philosophical tradition.” With these arguments
in mind, O’Sullivan’s chapter argues that non-Asian scholars educated in
“Western” pedagogic systems can help re-center the conceptual frames
of the intercultural humanities through exploring such notions as weak-
ness, individualism, and loneliness. The increasing economic and political
power of China has not been matched by redefinition of Asian academic
institutions and practices in terms of the intellectual and pedagogic
traditions of the historically dominant culture of the region.
In “Global English’s Centers of Consecration,” Myles Chilton draws
on Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (1993) to address
how the global spread of Anglophone literary studies compels an
accounting for who consecrates what and why. Bourdieu’s model of
consecration involves the reciprocal validation of intellectual elites and
aesthetic canons, a model which has been adopted in such recent influ-
ential works as Pascale Casanova’s The Republic of Letters (2004) and
Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (mentioned earlier).
Asian institutions, even as they turn their critical gaze inward, continue
to seek validation from Anglo-center conferences, journals and publishers.
While the discipline’s roots cannot be ripped out, and a discipline needs
consecratory institutions to referee, control, approve, and set standards,
it is important to account for the consecratory tensions that arise in re-
orienting the discipline toward Asia. Chilton’s chapter considers whether
the consecratory power of Asian English centers can avoid merely repro-
ducing Anglocentric colonial, post-colonial, or neo-colonial hierarchies of
aesthetic value, canonical durability, and institutional practice.
Steve Clark’s “Asian English in Arnold, Mill and Newman” opens
by considering the project to renovate the ancient Indian university of
Nalanda, as a case-study in the difficulty of returning to a purely indige-
nous “longer heritage.” The institution and its practices in its modern
form are necessarily reliant on models imported from Britain, Germany
and the US. Clark re-examines the Victorian genealogy offered by the
writings of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and John Henry Newman.
Their justifications of culture as disinterested self-development would
appear to invite post-colonial critique, if not indictment, for complicity
with the class, nationalist and racial ideologies within which they are
necessarily embedded. However, it is argued that they may also possess
a prospective and utopian dimension which may be restored by the appli-
cation of symptomatic reading, on the model of Louis Althusser. Such
analysis can reveal Asia as already present, if elided and displaced, at the
margins of the founding texts of the discipline. It will finally be suggested
that in the twenty-first century, not only Asian English but also of the
humanities themselves, should be regarded as a continuously renegoti-
ated heritage, not as the burden of an increasingly redundant past, but as
open to future applications and expanded possibilities.
Moving from nineteenth-century genealogies to the post-Covid chal-
lenges of the twenty-first century, John Phillips addresses current options
for the Asian university in “Literature and the Humanities in the Age of
Technological Disruption.” If the recent shift to online teaching at the
National University of Singapore (and elsewhere in Asia) was executed
rapidly and without resistance, then the establishment of the integrated
virtual learning environment [IVLE] earlier in the millennium, after the
SARS epidemic of 2003, helps to account for it. Online teaching and
virtual learning were in principle and in practice already in place. If the
crisis eventually subsides then the new conditions under which the univer-
sity currently operates are likely to continue in many respects. Phillips
identifies two connected trends: defensive strategies against the threat of
future technical disruption; and relocation of funding from the humani-
ties. He argues that in Asia the latter, rather than enduring continual crisis,
been renewed by the idea of lifelong learning, as future preparedness for
the rapidly changing job-market, and the introduction of liberal arts-based
programs. Beyond the primarily archival capacity of the so-called digital
humanities, a critical media theory marked by historical understanding of
languages and algorithms can take up the challenge typically assigned to
the university, especially when called upon to re-center itself in an Asian
context. Phillips closes by reading Arthur Yap’s “Paraphrase” as exempli-
fying not just the complexly syncretic heritage of Singapore itself but also
future directions for the Asian university.
The question remains of what form Asian English might take in a
post-Covid age uniquely dominated by potentially authoritarian technolo-
gies and unsettling economic exigencies. Certainly it seems probable that
dependence on imported Western models may be substantially reduced.
Initiatives already taken even in their early stages suggest removing the
existing spatiotemporal boundaries from the idea of a university degree:
the campus is no longer a place. Many of the traditional structures of

higher education are likely to be eroded or even disappear, including
autonomous departments, to be replaced by continually updating inter-
disciplinary modules. It is an open question whether what will emerge
will be a distinctively Asian institution. It is noteworthy, however, that
Singapore, often portrayed as a hyper-conservative government control-
ling an acquiescent population, has proven itself capable of implementing
policies of radical destruction (evident from its continual architectural
self-renovation) where deemed necessary for national prosperity.
It remains to be seen if the initially ineffectual Anglo-American
response to the pandemic, in contrast to the more collectivist approach
generally adopted by Asian nations, will result in a more general loss of
cultural prestige. Additionally, the neoliberal orthodoxies promoted by
the economics department of major Anglo-American universities could be
seen as particularly culpable for preaching abstention from the forms of
state intervention that have proved most effective in dealing with Covid.
This argument can be extended to the humanities, where a comparable
de-centering may occur simply as a consequence of changes to interna-
tional mobility through visa and quarantine restrictions. The high casualty
rates in Britain and the US may make them less attractive education desti-
nations; reductions in overseas students have already had near-disastrous
financial consequences for all but the wealthiest and most elite insti-
tutions. It remains to be seen how this might redefine Asian English,
perhaps producing enhanced cooperation among regional universities,
the ideal aspired to if unfulfilled in Nalanda; but one might confidently
predict less reflex deference to the “centers of consecration” of Western
academia.
Notes
1. The Cambridge English Tripos dates from 1917. The English department
at the University of Tokyo was established in 1877.
2. Yang, Rui. “The East–West Axis? Liberal Arts Education in East Asian
Universities.” Liberal Arts Education and Colleges in East Asia: Possibilities
and Challenges in the Global Age. Insung Jung, Mikiko Nishimura, and
Toshiaki Sasao (Eds.). Singapore: Springer, 2016. 30.
3. English, James F. The Global Future of English Studies. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 191.
4. Williams, Jeffrey J. “Introduction: Institutionally Speaking.” The Institu-

tion of Literature. Jeffery J. Williams (Ed.). Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2002. 1.
5. Brouilette, Sarah. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2019. 2.
6. Yang, 27.
7. Ibid., 27.
8. Jung, Insung. “Introduction.” Liberal Arts Education and Colleges in East
Asia: Possibilities and Challenges in the Global Age. Insung Jung, Mikiko
Nishimura, and Toshiaki Sasao (Eds.). Singapore: Springer, 2016. 5.
9. Araki, quoted in Yukari Yoshihara. “The Past, the Present and the
Future of the Project, ‘English Studies in Asia.’” English Studies in Asia.
Masazumi Araki, Chee Seng Lim, Ryuta Minami, and Yukari Yoshihara
(Eds.). Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish, 2007. 17–18.
10. Yoshihara, 18.
11. Joshi, Svati. “Rethinking English: An Introduction.” Rethinking English:
Essays in Literature, Language, History. Svati Joshi (Ed.). Bombay: Oxford
University Press, 1994. 1.
12. Ibid., 1.
13. O’Sullivan, Michael, David Huddart and Carmen Lee. “General Intro-
duction.” The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language and
Literature. Michael O’Sullivan, David Huddart and Carmen Lee (Eds.).
Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. xvi.
14. Ibid., xvii.
15. Tope, Omoniyi and Mukul Saxena. “Introduction.” Contending with
Globalization in World Englishes. Mukul Saxena and Tope Omoniyi (Eds.).
Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2010. 11.
16. O’Sullivan, Michael, David Huddart and Carmen Lee, xviii.
17. Ibid., xviii.
18. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2015.
96.
References
Brouilette, Sarah. 2019. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
English, James F. 2012. The Global Future of English Studies. Malden MA: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Joshi, Svati. 1994. Rethinking English: An Introduction. In Rethinking English:
Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Svati Joshi, 1–31. Bombay:
Oxford University Press.
Jung, Insung. 2016. Introduction. In Liberal Arts Education and Colleges in East
Asia: Possibilities and Challenges in the Global Age, eds. Insung Jung, Mikiko
Nishimura, and Toshiaki Sasao, 1–12. Singapore: Springer.
Loomba, Ania. 2015. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.
O’Sullivan, Michael, David Huddart and Carmen Lee. 2015. General Introduc-
tion. In The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language and Liter-
ature, eds. Michael O’Sullivan, David Huddart and Carmen Lee, xv–xxviii.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Rošker, Jana S. 2016. The Rebirth of the Moral Self: The Second Generation of
Modern Confucians and Their Modernization Discourses. Hong Kong: Chinese
University of Hong Kong Press.
Tope, Omoniyi and Mukul Saxena. 2010. Introduction. In Contending with
Globalization in World Englishes, eds. Mukul Saxena and Tope Omoniyi,
1–22. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Williams, Jeffrey J. 2002. Introduction: Institutionally Speaking. In The Institu-
tion of Literature, ed. Jeffery J. Williams, 1–18. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Yang, Rui. 2016. The East-West Axis? Liberal Arts Education in East Asian
Universities. In Liberal Arts Education and Colleges in East Asia: Possibili-
ties and Challenges in the Global Age, eds. Insung Jung, Mikiko Nishimura,
and Toshiaki Sasao, 27–38. Singapore: Springer.
Yoshihara, Yukari. 2007. The Past, the Present and the Future of the Project,
“English Studies in Asia.” In English Studies in Asia, eds. Masazumi Araki,
Chee Seng Lim, Ryuta Minami, and Yukari Yoshihara, 9–23. Kuala Lumpur:
Silverfish.
CHAPTER 2
British Romanticism in China: Received,

Revised, and Resurrected
Ou Li
The reception history of British Romanticism in twentieth-century China

unfolds as a drama of vicissitude, corresponding to the tumultuous
course of Chinese national history and violently shifting literary poli-
tics. While all foreign literary texts or trends are reconfigured by their
interaction with the national tradition, the afterlife of British Roman-
ticism in China is distinguished by the radically divided and polarized
responses it received in the past century. This chapter first looks at the
etymology and definition of the term “Romanticism”1 in English and
Chinese, respectively, and draws attention to their considerable disparity.
Originally published as “British Romanticism in China: Revised in Reception,”

IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship, 7:1 (2018): 5–28, https://doi.
org/10.22492/ijl.7.1.01.
O. Li (B)
Department of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Ma Liu Shu, Hong Kong
e-mail: liou@cuhk.edu.hk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
M. Chilton et al. (eds.), Asian English,
Asia-Pacific and Literature in English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7_2
18 O. LI
It then traces the reception of British Romantic literature in the course of

the twentieth century, highlighting in particular the late-Qing introduc-
tion, New Culturist proliferation, Communist China’s suppression, and
post-1976 resurrection. With this trajectory of the afterlife of Romanti-
cism, this chapter unveils at the same time the peculiar transformation
the concept of “Romanticism” underwent in twentieth-century China.
Focusing on several of the key aspects of the term, namely, radicalism,
self-expressiveness, and nature-ism, I shall make the case that Romanti-
cism, as both a concept and a body of literature, had been treated with
drastically divergent or even contradictory stances in China along with
the conflicting ideologies taking turns dominating the Chinese cultural
discourse. The opposing attitudes toward the same authors or texts may
suggest the oxymoronic qualities of British Romanticism itself, but they
also demonstrate the preponderant influence of the national ideology over
the aesthetic values of foreign literature in the reception process. Such an
overwhelming ideological predominance reveals the essentially utilitarian
approach China had taken to foreign literature, and British Romanticism
in particular. This chapter therefore contributes to the broader discus-
sion of the re-centering of Western literature in Asia by looking into
the process in which British Romanticism was substantially revised while
being received and resurrected in China.
“Romanticism” and Langman

Zhuyi: Translation and Revision
The substantial revision can be seen by a comparison of the Chinese
term langman zhuyi (浪漫主義) with the English original, “Romanti-
cism.” The English term is of course notoriously amorphous and has
led to numerous debates among literary historians and Romanticists who,
nevertheless, agree on at least certain core aspects of Romanticism. Many
note the etymology of the word “Romanticism” in the prefix roman-
and discuss the close association of Romanticism with romance: “the
Romantic is the sole period that is named after a literary form.”2 The
genre of romance indicates a fascination with the fantastic realm and an
escapist impulse to “fade far away”3 from reality. However, the evocation
of the enchanting world of romance was inspired by contemporary polit-
ical happenings, which encouraged a bold vision of infinite possibilities of
the actual world. The fascination with romance paradoxically suggests an
active engagement with reality. Revolutionary France, for example, was
2 BRITISH ROMANTICISM IN CHINA … 19
“a country in romance”4 for Wordsworth. The origin of the word refers

not just to the genre of romance, but the Romance languages as well.
These vernacular languages emerged as a reaction against the authoritative
and authoritarian Latin. The very word “Romanticism,” rooted in both
the genre and the language group, signifies a radical political stance. The
periodization of Romanticism reveals its political weight as well. Scholars
have contended till this day as to where to locate the starting and finishing
points of the Romantic era, and almost all the different dates they have
suggested are of momentous political significance. The beginning of the
era, often identified as 1776, 1783, or 1789, and the conclusion, be
it 1832 or 1848, bookend the historical period of Romanticism with
revolution and reform.5
The political energy of Romanticism informs the quintessen-
tially Romantic self-expressive mode. Hazlitt in his famous essay on
Wordsworth describes his poetry as “a pure emanation of the Spirit of
the Age,” which “partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolu-
tionary movement of our age.”6 The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
identifies the “chief emphasis” of Romanticism as “upon freedom of indi-
vidual self-expression” and describes it as a “literary rebellion” against
neo-Classicism.7 Abrams’ Glossary of Literary Terms makes the revolu-
tionary nature of Romanticism against Neoclassicism more evident by
putting them together in one entry as “neoclassic and romantic,” because
Romanticism is what Neoclassicism is not.
Another signature quality of Romanticism is the prominence of nature
as its poetic subject. However, Abrams reminds us, “[i]t is a mistake …
to describe the romantic poets as simply ‘nature Poets,’” because external
nature is only “a stimulus” for the Romantic poet to turn to his/her
internal world.8 Romantic nature-ism, therefore, paradoxically suggests
transcendentalism, which places emphasis on the power of the human
mind. As Wordsworth famously puts it, “the mind / Is lord and master.”9
These core elements, political radicalism, self-expressiveness, and the
prominence of nature, are among the most salient features of Roman-
ticism. As with the English term, “Romanticism” in Chinese can also
be approached from its origins. The now-standard Chinese translation
of “Romanticism”, langman zhuyi, started to appear together with its
several other renderings, such as luoman zhuyi (羅曼主義), chuanqi zhuyi
(傳奇主義), and huangdan zhuyi (荒誕主義),10 around the late 1910s
in China.11 The version that finally prevailed, langman zhuyi, was most
likely borrowed not directly from English, but Japanese.12 Many leading
20 O. LI
Chinese intellectual and cultural figures spent an important stage of their

lives in Japan at the dawn of the twentieth century, when the Romantic
wave in Japanese literature began to subside. Their first encounter with
Romanticism almost certainly took place in Japan and in the medium of
Japanese.
Some of the earliest references to “Romanticism” in Chinese seem to
corroborate this speculation on the source of the Chinese term. Tian Han
(1898–1968), a founding member of the Creation Society (Chuangzao
she) who was then studying in Japan, discusses the problem with trans-
lating the term “Romanticism” into Chinese in his long article from
1919, “The Poet and the Issue of Labor.” He first provides its Japanese
translations both in kanji, as 浪漫主義, and in katakana, as ロマンチシ
ズム. The latter phonetic translation, he points out, is more commonly
adopted in Japan. He therefore favors luoman zhuyi, the phonetic transla-
tion in Chinese, which, he indicates, “is disapproved of by many in today’s
Chinese literary circles”.13 He, however, disapproves of other current
versions in China such as chuanqi zhuyi and huangdan zhuyi because they
“fail to represent what the term ‘Romanticism’ involves” and easily incur
misunderstanding.14
Tian was not alone among the Japanese-educated Chinese writers
and intellectuals in using the term “Romantic/ism” around the time,
although not all of them preferred luoman zhuyi as Tian did. In several
essays written in 1921, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), Lu Xun’s brother,
who had also studied in Japan, describes himself and his ideas as
“Romantic,” in both cases using langman.15 In another essay, he puts
langman zhuyi in parentheses after chuanqi zhuyi, indicating the two
are equivalent.16 Liang Qichao (1873–1929), who became an exile in
Japan for more than a decade (1898–1912) after the failure of the 1898
Hundred Days’ Reform, calls an ancient Chinese poem by Qu Yuan
(340–278 BC) langman in a 1922 essay.17
From “A Discussion on the Translation of Literary Terms,” a column
in a 1923 issue of Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) edited by Xi Di
(Zheng Zhenduo, 1898–1958), one can assume that the diversity of the
Chinese terms for “Romanticism” had by then become confusing. One
of the contributors, Shen Yanbing (1896–1981), uses various Chinese
versions of “Romanticism” to make the point that specialized literary
terms should have uniform translations.18 Yu Zhi (Hu Yuzhi, 1896–
1986), another contributor, proposes a dictionary of literary terms, where
different translations of the same term can be provided in the order of
their appropriateness. His example is “Romanticism” as well: the dictio-

nary entry should include its three translations, luoman zhuyi, langman
zhuyi, chuanqi zhuyi, and in this order.19 He did not seem to be aware
that two months before their discussion came to press, such a dictionary
had been published. In this Encyclopedic Dictionary of New Culture,20
the entry “Romanticism” is translated as langman zhuyi.21 The title of
the dictionary, echoing its contemporary New Culture Movement, seems
to suggest itself to be the dictionary of the age and thereby gives a
sense of authority to langman zhuyi, which would indeed replace other
translations by the end of the 1920s.
The survival of langman zhuyi over other Chinese versions of “Roman-
ticism” might very well be attributed to its hybrid source as a loanword
that is nevertheless rendered in an original Chinese phrase. As a loanword
of the Japanese kanji 浪漫主義, which are themselves a translation from
English, the Chinese term is twice removed from the original. It is,
however, also “the return of the native” with the adoption of the same
Chinese characters, albeit with an altered meaning. The latter half of
the four-character Chinese term, 主義 (zhuyi), is the Japanese phonetic
translation of “ism” in English during the Meiji era. The kanji characters
suggest a loose connection with the original Chinese term, which, in clas-
sical Chinese texts, means “moral principle.” The first half of the term, 浪
漫 (langman), is returned to Chinese with its original meaning adapted.
Shi (1997) cites Natsume Sōseki (夏目漱石) and Kuriyagawa Hakuson
(厨川白村) as the originators of the Japanese kanji 浪漫 rōman, found in
their respective works, Theory of Literature (1906)22 and Ten Lectures on
Modern Literature (1912).23 According to McDougall (1971), “[a]mong
the Japanese writers on romanticism … Kuriyagawa Hakuson had perhaps
the largest following in China”24 (p. 108), Tian Han included. After
a lapse of around a decade, the Japanese term was borrowed back into
Chinese from its circulation among the Chinese students in Japan.25
The original Chinese phrase 浪漫 can be traced back to a poem
written by Su Shi (1037–1101), a leading Song poet, titled “Visiting a
Changzhou Monastery with Meng Zhen” (與孟震同遊常州僧舍): “Of
late I have gradually felt that this life is but an illusion/and have again
wandered in Sanwu area, unbridled and aimless ” [my emphasis] (年
來轉覺此生浮, 又作三吳浪漫遊).26 Here langman means unrestrained,
following one’s instinct, an attitude affinitive to the Daoist belief in the
natural state of things. In modern Chinese, langman, similar to the lower-
case “romantic,” means: (1) fanciful and idealistic, removed from reality
22 O. LI
and (2) unrestrained and unconventional, especially in sexual relation-

ships. Both meanings, rather than descending from classical Chinese, were
more likely formed after Western Romanticism was introduced to China.
With these elements put together, langman zhuyi is a double-layered
loanword that at the same time taps into classical Chinese sources, hence
sounding both exotic and native. The loan from the Japanese transla-
tion of the original English term suggests a progressive cultural stance
that nevertheless has to be conveyed with echoes with traditional Chinese
values.
Just as the formation of the term resulted from the interaction of
neologism with classical Chinese language, which changed the meaning
of both, so the definition of the Chinese term reveals the revision of
the imported concept in its encounter with Chinese literary politics.
Looking at three rather representative definitions of the term in the
1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, one will find not just their increasing depar-
ture from the original, but the drastic shift among themselves within the
national context.
The above-mentioned Encyclopedic Dictionary of New Culture provides
one of the earliest definitions of the term. It defines Romanticism as rising
from the clash with Classicism and, while noting its diversity across Euro-
pean nations, distils its central features into “subjectivism,” “liberalism,”
and “emotionalism.”27 The overall definition is followed by three sections
on the British, German, and French Romantic movements, respectively,
and two sections on “Romanticism in philosophy” and “Romanticism in
ethics and actual life.”28 In comparison with the English concept, one
notes that neither the primacy of nature nor the political energy is high-
lighted. Instead, the focus is put on the emancipation of the individual
and recovery of the inherent, independent human spirit from the fettering
traditions and classics, a focus that resonates with the tenor of the New
Culture Movement.
In the highly influential 1963 History of Western Aesthetics, which
remains a chief source of citation still today, Zhu Guangqian (1897–
1986), a leading Chinese scholar on aesthetics, identifies Romanticism
as having three common characteristics: subjectivity, Medievalism, and
“return to nature”.29 If the New Culturist Dictionary puts more stress
on the intellectual and cultural aspects of Romanticism, then this one
reviews Romanticism in a more political and ideological light. Absent
in the former dictionary is a Marxist historiographical perspective from
which these Romantic characteristics are seen as products of their socio-

political circumstances. Subjectivity demonstrates “the individualism of
the rising capitalist class.” Medievalism reveals contemporary nationalist
awareness and demands for democracy. Nature-ism was a reaction against
the capitalist urbanization and industrialization.30
The 1990 Dictionary of Foreign Literature suggests that such an ideo-
logical approach persisted to at least the end of the century. It gives two
meanings for langman zhuyi: “1. the creative mode that is opposed to
realism, characterized by its passionate language, extravagant imagina-
tion, and hyperbolic style, which has existed in literatures of all nations
from ancient times; 2. the literary movement at the turn of the nineteenth
century in the West.”31 With the first meaning, the term can be loosely
adopted to refer to the romantic elements in classical Chinese literature.
This broadened meaning, however, uproots Romanticism from its histor-
ical specificity, which, as discussed above, very much defines its essence
and thereby tones down its political and poetic radicalism. The second
meaning in its elaboration evidently takes after the Marxist turn already
found in the 1960s definition of Romanticism:
it is the consequence of the bankruptcy of the kingdom of Reason

promised by the Enlightenment thinkers and the manifestation of the disil-
lusionment with the social and political order established by the French
Bourgeois Revolution. The intellectual sources of Romanticism are the
detestation of the bourgeois way of life and the resistance to the capi-
talist mundane reality, spiritual barrenness, and egotism, the pursuit of
emancipation of individuality, and the longing for a world in harmony.32
The Marxist vocabulary such as “the French Bourgeois Revolution”

and the values engendered by “capitalism” bespeak the Chinese revi-
sion of the English term. In a more recent monograph, the definition
remains unchanged in its Marxist historiographical view: Romanticism is
“a literary trend that developed from the rise of the bourgeois revolution
and nationalist liberation movement at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.”33 In these post-1949 definitions, all the core elements of
the original term, political radicalism, self-expressiveness, and nature-
ism, are there. Yet, in being subordinated to the historical context that
is conceived in Marxist terms, they are essentially reduced to passive,
subservient products of class struggle. This distinctively Marxist bent in
24 O. LI
the Chinese term langman zhuyi has to be traced back to the recep-
tion history of Romantic literature in China, in the process of which
the key components of the concept “Romanticism” were reframed and
reinterpreted.
Introduction of Romanticism:
Late-Qing Appropriation
Romantic literature entered China at the beginning of the twentieth
century, when late-Qing intellectuals and Reformists were looking at
Western learning for ways to rescue the collapsing Qing empire from
its domestic unrest and threats from imperialist powers. Liang Qichao,
a leading late-Qing Reformist, was the first figure who introduced
Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley to China. In his essay published in The
China Discussion (Qing yi bao), the journal he established in Yokohama,
Japan during his exile, Liang makes a reference to Wordsworth.34 Byron’s
and Shelley’s portraits first appeared in another journal Liang founded in
Yokohama, New Fiction (Xin xiaoshuo), in the second (1903) and four-
teenth issue (1906), respectively. In the third issue of the same journal
is the translation of excerpts from The Giaour and “The Isles of Greece”
in Don Juan, excerpts that Liang includes in his own political fantasy,
The Future of New China (Xin zhongguo weilai ji).35 In 1905, Scott’s
Ivanhoe (Sakexun jiehou yingxiong lüe) was published, translated by Lin
Shu (1852–1924), the immensely popular late-Qing translator of many
Western novels. Keats made his first entrance into China in 1907 in an
important early essay by Lu Xun (1881–1936), “On the Power of Mara
Poetry” (Moluo shili shuo), but he is only mentioned in passing. The essay
was first published in Henan, a radical journal established by overseas
Chinese students in Japan.
These three figures’ divergent, if not opposed, political and literary
stances give one a glimpse of the multi-facetedness of Romanticism, which
lends itself to its Chinese readers’ active appropriation that developed in
diverse directions. Lu Xun, a leading figure in the following decade’s
New Culture Movement and the author of the first vernacular Chinese
fiction, had a very different take on Romanticism from both Liang and
Lin. Lin, the monolingual translator who rendered his bilingual assis-
tants’ oral account of the novel in classical Chinese, would be regarded
as a major conservative for his adamant defense of traditional language
and culture against the New Culturist sweeping tide. Even though Liang
and Lin were both key late-Qing disseminators of Western literature,

Liang’s chief advocation of political literature contrasts with Lin’s choice
of popular, sentimental Western novels. On the other hand, however,
Liang’s “highly politicized campaign for new fiction opens the space
for Lin Shu’s translation by supplying a kind of Dao: national salvation
becomes the contemporary Dao.”36
These rather sporadic early appearances of Romantic authors and texts
suggest a lack of overall grasp of Romanticism as both a body of literature
and a literary concept in the late-Qing era. If Liang noted Wordsworth’s
worship of nature, he put it into the traditional Chinese cultural frame-
work of Daoism. Both Liang and Lin found in the Romantic literature to
which they were exposed a vehement expression of the national identity,
not the self. Among the three key components of Romanticism, political
energy was their major interest, which, however, was reinterpreted as a
means of national preservation. Both Byron’s poetic passages and Scott’s
novel center on the tension between one’s national identity and the
foreign conquering and ruling power, a tension that parallels the antag-
onism of the Han Chinese toward the Manchu conquerors and rulers of
the Qing Dynasty, and at the same time evokes the similar national crisis
incurred by imperialist forces in China.
In Liang’s political novel where he alludes to Byron’s lines that lament
the decline of Greece from its past glory to its present subjugation,
he demonstrates an essentially utilitarian view of literature which was
shared by many of his contemporaries, even though their emphasis on the
socio-political dimension of literature is not incompatible with Romantic
radicalism. For Liang, Byron and his texts served an exigent political func-
tion, namely, to awaken in the Chinese readers a sense of humiliation of
living as the colonized people and the realization of the imminent need to
reform the empire. The immense popularity of “The Isles of Greece” in
China reveals the same instrumentality of the Chinese reading of Roman-
ticism. The four Chinese translators of the song, Liang Qichao, Ma Junwu
(1881–1940), Su Manshu (1884–1918), and Hu Shi (1891–1962)—all
leading intellectuals and poets of their time—unexceptionally embraced it
for its sublime lamentation over the decline of a once-glorious civilization
and its rebellious energy in inspiring the oppressed nationalities. None of
them, however, gave any heed to or showed interest in the satirical quality
of this ballad or the complexity of the overall Don Juan.37
Lin’s rendition of the title Ivanhoe in Chinese as “A Heroic Tale after
the Saxon Crisis” betrays a similar concern about China’s plight. As Lin
26 O. LI
writes in the preface to his translation, one of the key interests of Scott’s
tale is how the Saxon hero kindles his people’s grief and indignation over
the demise of their old kingdom at the hands of the Normans.38 Lin does
not need to spell out that his own ancient, dying country was caught in a
similar precarious situation and in desperate need of heroic inspiration as
well. This theme fits in hand in glove with the medium of classical Chinese
Lin chose, with which he could rewrite the original text into his context.
As Hu Ying observes, Lin “treats the source language text as open-ended,
and the act of translation enters into this open space, establishing linkage
between the text and contemporary politics.”39
Even without systematic knowledge about Romanticism, the late-Qing
literati recognized its political energy, which, however, was reframed
into their own cultural tradition of Confucian loyalty to the country.
In their urge to preserve the country by seeking an immediate remedy
for its crisis, the literariness of Romanticism would probably seem far-
fetched and excessive. This instrumentalist approach they had taken to
Romantic or Western literature in general was in essence an extension
of the Self-Strengthening Movement (1860s–90s), which insisted on the
preservation of Chinese learning as “the fundamental structure,” whereas
Western learning would merely be borrowed for its “practical function.”
The Proliferation of Romanticism: The

New Culturist Enthusiasm and Division
The desperate attempt to salvage the Qing empire from its ruins while
keeping the traditional Chinese culture intact soon gave way to more
radical political and cultural reforming efforts that ended up in the 1911
Revolution and the New Culture Movement (1915–1920s). The atti-
tude toward Western learning experienced a similar shift, from a cautious,
partial borrowing to an enthusiastic, wholesale embrace. This tendency
can already be detected in the above-mentioned essay written by Lu
Xun (1996), a leading New Culturist, which focuses on the Satanic
Romantics such as Byron and Shelley.40 His essay distinguishes itself from
other late-Qing introductions to Romanticism in its celebration not of
these Romantics’ heroic devotion to the glorious nationalist cause that
Liang and Lin emphasized, but of their anti-heroic and often misan-
thropic iconoclasm. Its subversive power anticipated the anti-traditionalist
New Culture Movement that took place in the ensuing decade, during
which the importation of Romantic literature flourished. One of the
most important New Culturist manifestos, Hu Shi’s (1891–1962) 1917

article, “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature,” is obvi-
ously indebted to the manifesto of Romanticism, Wordsworth’s Preface
to Lyrical Ballads, although Hu does not refer to Wordsworth until
later. The centennial anniversaries of the Romantics in the 1920s and
1930s encouraged further popularization of Romanticism, when intro-
ductions, translations, and commemorations of Keats, Shelley, Byron,
Blake, Scott, Coleridge, and Lamb were published between 1921 and
1934 in some leading Republican journals such as Fiction Monthly, The
Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), Poetry (Shi kan), Morning Post
Supplementary (Chenbao fukan), and Literature and Arts Monthly (Wenyi
yuekan). Among them, the special commemorative issue on Shelley of The
Creation Quarterly (1:4, 1923), established by the Creation Society, and
that on Byron of Fiction Monthly (15:4, 1924), edited by the Literary
Research Association (Wenxue yanjiuhui), are the most elaborate and
enthusiastic.
The flourishing Romantic literature was buttressed with a strong sense
of affinity many New Culturists found in some central ideas encapsu-
lated in Romanticism as an intellectual trend, in particular, the unleashed
self and revolutionary energy, both literary and political. With a similar
Romantic spirit, the New Culturists proposed a clean break with the
traditional Confucian values and a thorough Westernization, promoting
the emancipation of the individual, including the liberation of women,
from the oppressive Confucian ethics. Fully conscious that this revolution
in the traditional culture could not have taken place without a revolu-
tion in language, they simultaneously launched the vernacular movement
to replace classical Chinese. The radicalness of this cultural and literary
revolution makes it not improper to regard it as a Chinese Romantic
movement. Lee, for example, labels some Chinese writers of the New
Culture era “the Romantic generation,” because both the Chinese and
the European movements
represented a reaction against the classic tradition of order, reason, schema-

tization, ritualization, and structuring of life. Both ushered in a new
emphasis on sincerity, spontaneity, passion, imagination, and the release of
individual energies—in short, the primacy of subjective human sentiments
and energies.41
28 O. LI
A closer look at this Romantic generation’s diverse programs of the

literary revolution and the literary polemics in this era, however, reveals a
more complex picture. The New Culturists’ “campaign against cultural
backwardness was presented first of all instrumentally,” because they
believed that this cultural revolution would “exercise a determinative
influence upon political change.”42 In this sense, they were no different
from their late-Qing Reformist predecessors. As Denton points out,
“although they uniformly denounced the didactic concept of ‘literature
conveys the Dao,’ May Fourth literary theorists proposed to use literature
in much the same way.”43 Their “instrumentalist” approach is manifest
in their treatment of Romanticism as a particularly powerful means to
achieve the end of an ideological revolution.
With this predominant ideological concern, two aspects of Romanti-
cism that the New Culturists particularly championed, political radicalism
and self-expressiveness, developed into almost mutually exclusive qual-
ities, appropriated respectively, by individuals and literary groups with
opposing values and tenets. This can be clearly seen in the case of
Byron and Shelley, the most popular Romantics in this era. While Byron
remained the most idolized Western Romantic in China since the late-
Qing era, his Satanic, “destructive” egotism celebrated by Lu Xun was
carefully distinguished by his brother Zhou Zuoren from Shelley’s “con-
structive” idealism for the good of all.44 Even Shelley himself received
divided treatments despite many New Culturists’ common admiration
of him. For the leftist Literary Research Association, which espoused
realism, as famously expressed by their slogan of “art for life’s sake,”
Shelley was chiefly a fiery idealist and political activist. However, for the
Creation Society—which claimed itself Romantic before its later Marxist
turn, their slogan being “art for art’s sake”—Shelley was primarily an
acclaimed self-expressive lyricist. On Shelley’s centenary, Zhou Zuoren,
a founding figure of the Association, chose to translate “A Song: Men
of England”45 from Shelley’s explicitly political “popular songs,” and the
same poem was translated in the same year by Zheng Zhenduo, another
leading Associationist, who published it on the eleventh anniversary of
the 1911 Revolution, 10 October.46 In the special issue of The Creation
Quarterly, Guo Moruo (1892–1978), a leading Creationist, selects eight
less openly provocative lyrics instead, including “To a Skylark,” “Ode
to the West Wind,” “Mutability,” and “Stanzas Written in Dejection”47
(1923, 19–39). Although the Associationists and Creationists presented
a different Shelley, they both appropriated Shelley to promote their own

aesthetic and ideological vision.
In comparison with radicalism and self-expressiveness, the other key
component of Romanticism, nature-ism, seemed almost effaced in these
ideological contentions. Instead, it was reshaped by both proponents and
opponents of the New Culture Movement to be incorporated into their
conflicting literary discourses. Wordsworth, the passionate worshipper of
nature, was embraced by the New Culturists not so much for being
a nature poet as the prefacer of revolutionary poetics, whose celebra-
tion of nature was subsumed into his expression of “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings”48 of the poet’s self. On the other hand,
the more conservative Critical Review Group (Xueheng pai) criticized
Wordsworth’s Romantic manifesto but promoted his apparently more
traditionalist poetry of nature, with which they evoked the classical
Chinese tianyuan poetry49 and at the same time challenged their rivals’
thorough Westernization and rejection of traditional Chinese culture.50
This group, however, was not composed of old-fashioned tradition-
alists as one might expect. Anglo-American educated, they mocked
their radical counterparts’ shallow and crude understanding of Western
culture. Wu Mi (1894–1978), a leading member of the group, studied
under Irving Babbitt, whose anti-Romanticism must have influenced him.
Same as the Critical Review Group, Liang Shiqiu (1903–1987), another
belligerent anti-Romantic figure and a loyal disciple of Babbitt’s as well,
has penned perhaps the most militant attack on the Romantic excessive-
ness in China. Liang ridicules those who introduced Western literature
to China as mere dilettantes: according to him, “the New Literary
Movement, as a whole, was a Romantic chaos”.51 These anti-New Cultur-
ists, it seems, brought contemporary Anglo-American modernist reaction
against Romanticism52 back to China, where the Romantic afterlife had
just started thriving, an irony that is a consequence of the asynchronous
nature of reception.
To further complicate the situation, even within the same literary
group, tensions and contradictions can be found in its members’ complex
stances toward Romanticism. The anti-Romantic Liang was a member
of the Crescent Moon Society (Xinyue she), a prominent literary group
during the era which had made remarkable contributions to the forma-
tion of the modern Chinese literary tradition, especially in the realm of
New Poetry (poetry written in vernacular Chinese). With many of its
members returning from Britain and America, Romantic poetry was a
30 O. LI
major shaping force for their creation of the new genre in Chinese. Hu
Shi, the first experimenter of New Poetry, was inspired by Wordsworth’s
radical poetics and tried his hand at a translation of “The Isles of Greece.”
Xu Zhimo (1897–1931), who discovered Romantic poetry at Cambridge,
translated and wrote extensively on Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and
Keats. His own poetry is profuse with images that are so recogniz-
ably Romantic that in hindsight they look almost derivative. At the
time, however, his importation of the English meter as well as Romantic
imagery into New Poetry was bold and (paradoxically) original. He was
inspired by Romanticism not just as a poet but as a man, fashioning for
himself such a romantic life53 that in his case, being “Romantic” and
“romantic” become almost indistinguishable. Wen Yiduo (1899–1946),
another member of the Crescent Moon Society, alludes to Wordsworth
in one of his most famous poems, “Dead Water,” and dedicates a poem to
Keats, paying tribute to him as “The Loyal Minister of Art.”54 Zhu Xiang
(1904–1933) was labeled “the Chinese Keats” for his frequent references
to the English poet on top of being a major translator of Keats and other
Romantics.55
Despite the unquestionable influence of Romantic poetry on these
Crescent Moon poets, however, they did not necessarily share all the
ideological concerns and aesthetic values of Romanticism. As with Liang
Shiqiu, both Wen and Xu reacted against the extravagant, formless free
verse ushered in by the radical vernacular movement. In place of the
self-proclaimed Romantic Creationists’ effusive, egotistically sublime new
poems, they called for formalism and introduced metrical and stan-
zaic disciplines into New Poetry. Their poetic experiments and stylistic
concerns, however, were attacked as being disengaged from social reality
by the Creation Society and, later, by Lu Xun as well, in the late 1920s
fierce debate on the relationship between revolution and literature. The
Crescent Moon Society’s ambiguous stance toward Romanticism, there-
fore, puts into sharp focus the complexities and tensions of both the
original Romanticism and the New Culture Movement, this Chinese
Romantic Movement.
The New Culturist Romantic fervor started to subside from the
late 1920s onward, when the nation was plunged into a deep crisis
with the falling-out between the Nationalist and Communist Party and
the Japanese invasion. The celebration of radical iconoclasm and self-
expressiveness was overtaken by the cause of national salvation and an
increasing concern with the masses. Literary revolution, as the Associ-

ationist Cheng Fangwu famously phrases it, gave way to revolutionary
literature.56
Revolutionized Romanticism: Communist

China’s Suppression and Revision
Drastic changes in the reception of Romanticism took place after
Communist China was founded in 1949 and forged a totalitarian literary
and cultural policy that demanded all literature and art be an instrument
of the party. Several violent shifts can be observed in the post-1949 atti-
tudes toward Romantic authors and texts. Byron and Shelley were still
the most discussed and translated Romantics, but Shelley won the party’s
favor over Byron; the evaluation of Byron became warily dualistic. While
being celebrated as a relentless rebel against the ruling classes and a
champion of the downtrodden people, Byron was also critiqued for his
aristocratic stand on class and bourgeois, egotistic heroism. Two older
Romantics, Blake and Burns, enjoyed a particularly warm reception in
post-1949 China, occasioned by their bicentennial anniversaries in 1957
and 1959. On the other hand, together with Byron, some Romantics fell
into disfavor: Keats was degraded to a lesser Romantic, while Wordsworth
and Coleridge were labeled as reactionary or passive Romantics.57
These shifts took place along with numerous political campaigns
launched by the Communist Party, which had a rigid control over all
literary and artistic activities in China. Before the Sino–Soviet split, the
party’s official stance toward Romantic authors and texts basically derived
from the Soviet practice of dividing them into revolutionary or active ones
and reactionary or passive ones, which was based on its theory of “rev-
olutionary Romanticism”. The Soviet theory was established at the First
Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), where Maxim Gorky (1868–1936),
President of the Union of Soviet Writers, and Andrey Zhdanov (1896–
1948), the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee Secretary,
both affirmed “revolutionary Romanticism” as the standard in evaluating
Western literature. Revolutionary Romanticism, which glorifies reality and
thus serves the cause of the party, was subsequently accepted as the official
doctrine of literary creation and criticism in the Soviet Union,58 a guide-
line that China later faithfully abided by. By this standard, Byron and
Shelley were approved as revolutionary Romantics, whereas Wordsworth
and Coleridge were condemned as turncoat reactionary Romantics. Keats,
Another random document with
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time the crank of the grindstone must have been turning because the
bullet and the crank are fastened together, and therefore, instead of
traveling through the air, the bullet has used up its energy in turning
the grindstone. When you get a grindstone started it is rather hard to
stop, isn’t it? And if you didn’t stop it, it would keep on turning
around, wouldn’t it? If this is true, we might as well let it clean the
cannon. As the hole “I” is connected with the gas tank, we cannot let
it force the burnt gas out there, can we? We will therefore pull out the
plug “J” in the hole “E” just as the bullet reaches the point “K” so that
in coming back it will force the burnt gases and smoke out through
the hole “E.” Now we are all ready to start over again; the cannon
has been cleaned out, and the bullet still being fastened to the
grindstone, which is turning, as a result of the explosion, would
immediately begin starting out on another outward stroke. If we put
in the plug “J” again and pull out the plug “L,” the bullet or piston as
we might call it now, will suck in another charge of gas.
Fig. 7—Grinding a valve.
Fig. 8—A section of a Cylinder
showing location of various parts—
end view.
You can see that if you had two boys, one of them to pull out the
plugs, and another to fire the charge you could keep the gun firing
steadily, and run the grindstone. After you have done this for a while
you will get tired of taking out the plugs and putting them in, and
standing there with a match lit all the time, and you would wish there
was some way to make the grindstone, which was running, do all
this for you. This is exactly what happened to some of the old
engineers, and so they set about trying to accomplish this result.
They succeeded in rigging a piece of machinery that would open and
close these holes automatically, and with the introduction of
electricity they also devised a way whereby the charge could be
ignited by an electric spark instead of a match. The plugs which
cover the holes, they called valves and the plug which contained the
electric wires, used for firing the gas, they called a spark plug.
Now let us see what we have learned in this chapter. We have
found that it takes four strokes to explode one charge of gas
1. Suction stroke, during which the gas is sucked into the barrel
of the cannon, or cylinder as it is called.
2. The compression stroke, during which the gas is compressed
so that it will burn easier.
3. The explosive stroke, or working stroke, called so on account
of the fact that the explosive force of the gas is used to turn the
wheel.
4. The cleansing, or exhaust stroke, during which the burnt gas
and smoke is forced out of the barrel.
For this reason, a gas engine which works on this principle is
called a Four-Stroke Cycle Engine. It requires four strokes to
complete the entire operation and bring it back to the beginning
ready to start over again.
THE CYLINDER
So far we have confined ourselves to the parts of a cannon, but
now that we are going to take up the study of the motor in its details
let us call them by their regular names. The barrel of the cannon we
will call a cylinder. In an actual motor a cylinder is made out of cast
iron, carefully bored out inside, so that the hole is perfectly round,
and the sides of the wall as smooth as possible.
Fig. 9.
You will realize that this is necessary as we want to reduce, as much

as possible, any rubbing or friction, as it is called, between the piston
and cylinder walls. Next we must provide some means of cooling
these walls, as you know that the continuous firing would soon make
them very hot. This is done by surrounding the cylinder with what is
known as a water jacket through which water can be circulated,
thereby carrying off the heat, and keeping the iron from getting red
hot. We must also cut two holes in the side of the cylinder to make
places for the valves and a place for the spark plug.
Fig. 10—End view of Horizontal One-cylinder Motor, showing piston,

valves and valve mechanism.
A cylinder is generally mounted on its side in a one cylinder

engine, and is set up on end when it is desired to use more than
one. Therefore, in a one cylinder motor you will notice that the piston
moves back and forth, whereas in a two-cylinder, four-cylinder or six-
cylinder type, the pistons move up and down. As far as the action of
the parts is concerned they work in exactly the same way, only that
the valve mechanism has to be changed somewhat.
The cylinder is bolted to a framework called the crank case
which furnishes a solid foundation upon which it can rest.
VALVES
You will remember that in first discussing the drawing in and
cleaning out of the gas that two holes had to be cut in the sides of
the cylinder wall. One of these through which the fresh gas might be
sucked in, and the other through which the burnt gas might be
expelled. Also remember that we kept these holes plugged except
when it was necessary to have them open to perform their work.
Fig. 11—The evolution Fig. 12—A regular

of a Valve. Valve.
Now let us take a section of a valve and see how it is made up.
You will notice first the little plug “A” which covers the hole in the
cylinder; it is tapered very much like a glass stopper in a bottle for
the reason that in this form it is easier to fit it to the opening; it can be
“ground in” in the same way that a glass stopper can, in order to
make an air-tight fit. “B” is a rod known as the valve stem, and is
simply a round piece of steel fastened to the valve plug “A.” “S” is a
valve spring which holds the valve down into the cylinder wall, or
valve-seat, as it is called. In order to open these valves you can see
that all that is necessary for you to do is to push up on the valve
stem “B.” This will raise the valve “A” away from its seat into the
position shown by the dotted lines, leaving a space all around
through which the gas may enter or leave. In an actual motor,
however, little irregular pieces of steel, cut out in general shape
shown in Fig. 14 perform the operation of raising the valve.
Fig. 13—Three positions of a Valve Cam.
Fig. 13 shows three positions of one of these revolving pieces of

steel, technically called cams, first, in the act of just starting to raise
the valve; second, its position when the valve is entirely open; third,
its position when the valve has just closed. If both valves are
operated by these cams you can see that if they are set at the proper
position they can be opened at different times and entirely
independent of each other. If you will look at Fig. 3 you will see a
complete motor, the inlet valve on the left side, and the exhaust
valve on the right side. This figure will also show you the little cams
in their various positions at different points of the four strokes.
Sometimes the two valves, instead of being on opposite sides of the
cylinder, are placed on the same side, and both cams are put on the
same shaft, which, by the way, is called a cam-shaft.
Fig. 14—Names of Valve Parts.
Fig. 14 shows two such valves, the left hand one opening, and
the right hand one closed. The extreme left hand view shows the
way they would look if viewed from the end. It also gives you the
names of all the parts.
Fig. 7 shows how the valves are “ground in.” The way you do it is
to take the valve out, and coat it with very fine emery dust and oil,
and then put it back in place leaving off the spring, fit a wrench to it
on top as shown in the picture and twirl it around as you would a
glass stopper in a bottle until it is perfectly air-tight, after which the
valve should be removed and both it and the valve seat carefully
wiped off so that none of the emery will get into the cylinder or other
working parts of the engine and cause them to be cut.
There are several different ways of making valves and several
places to put them so that you must not always expect to find them
in the same place. Their action is the same, however, no matter
where they are situated or how they are operated, and I think with a
little examination and study you will always be able to find them and
understand how they work in any engine.
THE PISTON
The piston forms, as you will recall, the bullet in the cannon,
which instead of leaving the barrel, was made to travel back and
forth inside of the cylinder under the action of the explosive gas.
Owing to the fact that a solid piece of iron would be very heavy and
would get very warm, the real piston used in a motor is made hollow
so that it is merely a shell. Instead of fastening the rod to the end of
it, a small rod, called the piston pin is in the center of it, and to this
the connecting rod is connected. Fig. 16 shows a section of the
piston. You will notice that the piston pin is kept from sliding
sideways by a bolt that is screwed into it.
Fig. 15—A Piston, Piston Ring, and Piston Pin.

Owing to the fact that both the cylinder walls and piston get hot,
and that iron expands and contracts according to its temperature, it
is not possible to make a piston alone which would remain air-tight
all the time. Engineers, therefore, found it necessary to put rings,
which were cut at some point in their circumference, on the outside
of the piston itself. These piston rings, due to the fact that they are
cut, can accommodate themselves to the varying diameters of the
cylinder, and can therefore keep an air-tight fit, even when the piston
is moving back and forth all the time. Most of you, no doubt, know
that the plunger in a pump is made air-tight by one or a set of leather
washers, which, owing to their pliable structure, can expand or
contract so as to always fit air-tightly the pipe in the pump. Piston
rings work in precisely the same manner, and are always kept
lubricated so that they will work smoothly, thus doing away with any
friction which might result.
Fig. 16—A section of a Piston, showing location of

piston pin and end of connecting rods.
THE CRANK SHAFT
Most of you are familiar with a crank as applied to a grindstone.
A crank in a motor is practically the same shape except that it is
supported on two bearings instead of one and is therefore made in
the form shown in Fig. 17. The crank shafts for two and four-cylinder
motors are only a combination of two or four of these single cranks.
Crank shafts are made up of steel, carefully forged, and then turned
and ground down to proper size to fit the bearings for which they are
intended. They are hardened and every precaution taken to keep
them from wearing. They form one of the most important parts of the
motor because they change the back and forth motion of the piston
into the rotary motion of the fly wheel. The fly wheel in our former
illustration was represented by the grindstone itself. In the real motor
the fly wheel is made of cast iron, and after being carefully balanced
so that it turns evenly, it is securely bolted to the crank shaft, so that
they practically form one piece.
Fig. 17—A Four-cylinder Crank Shaft.

THE CONNECTING ROD
The connecting rod, as you can guess from its name, forms the
connecting link between the piston and crank shaft, transferring the
energy of the explosive gas, acting behind the piston, to the crank
shaft and fly wheel, from which it can be transmitted to the driving
wheels of the automobile. It is made up in some such form as shown
in Fig. 18 and is made of steel or bronze. It has a bearing at each
end, the smaller one fitting around the piston pin, the larger one
surrounding a portion of the crank shaft called the crank pin. Both of
these bearings are lubricated by oil which splashes up from the
bottom of the crank case when the engine is running. You will notice
that one of the bearings is cut in two and bolted together so that you
can take it off from the crank shaft, should you wish to examine it.
Fig. 18—A typical Connecting Rod.

Fig. 19—The two halves of the
Connecting Rod Bearing.
THE CRANK CASE
The crank case of a motor serves as a foundation for the engine,
furnishes a support for the main bearings in which the crank shaft
revolves and encloses the working parts in such a way as to provide
for their lubrication and protect them from the dust and other
substances which might materially hinder the proper performance of
their functions. To a certain extent the crank case might be
compared to the framework of the grindstone, although the latter
does not answer as many purposes as the real crank case of the
motor does.
Fig. 20—The two halves of a Four-cylinder Crank Case.

The case itself is made of iron or aluminum, and is so put
together that, although practically air-tight, there is still a means
provided for getting inside of it for examination of the working parts
or an adjustment of the bearings.
THE CARBURETOR
The carburetor or mixing chamber, as it is sometimes called, is a
device used for obtaining an explosive mixture of gasoline and air. It
consists, as shown by the accompanying drawing, of two principal
parts, an air pipe and gasoline pipe, the latter running through the
wall and discharging into the center of the former.
Fig. 21—Simple drawing of a Carburetor.
In order to make sure that the amount of gasoline flowing out of the
gasoline jet shall be just the right amount at all times it is necessary
to provide a little gasoline tank, which forms a part of the carburetor
casting itself, which is known as a float chamber, so that the amount
of gasoline in the main tank will not affect the amount discharged at
the nozzle. You can see why this is necessary if you think of a water
tank or a dam. If the water was almost up to the top of the dam and
you should bore a hole through the wall somewhere near the bottom,
the water would flow out faster than if the water was low. By putting
this little gasoline tank in the carburetor itself and keeping a certain
height of gasoline in this smaller reservoir, which always
automatically shuts off the supply at the right time, you can make the
pressure, and therefore the flow of the liquid, always the same. The
illustration will show this plainly. For instance, when the gasoline gets
low the little float will gradually drop down until the ball on the end of
the float stem will open the valve in the gasoline pipe. The gasoline
will then flow in from the tank until the proper amount has filled the
float chamber and caused the float to bob up to its former position,
carrying the ball, which closes the gasoline off, up with it. By this
means the requisite amount of gasoline is always kept in the float
chamber.
The amount of air entering the mixing chamber is controlled by
changing the size of the hole through which the air enters and the
quantity of gasoline admitted is regulated by means of a needle
valve in the gasoline pipe.
Although many carburetors, in fact most of them, do not look like
this drawing, yet their action is the same, and by careful study you
will find that the same principles enter into their construction. Fig. 22
shows an actual sectional drawing of a carburetor used on a four-
cylinder motor. In this particular carburetor, however, the float
chamber and float surround the mixing chamber, and the float valve,
instead of being directly under the float, is at the right hand side and
is operated by means of a lever. The needle valve, which is the little
round rod having a “T” handle, running up through the center of the
mixing chamber, controls the amount of gasoline flowing from the
gasoline chamber to the nozzle. The air comes up through the
bottom and around the gasoline jet. At the left you will notice a small
valve which opens downward, which you do not find on the other
carburetor. It is known as an auxiliary air valve and allows a certain
amount of air to be added to the mixture, a small quantity of which is
sometimes needed to keep the mixture just right. The throttle valve,
which looks like a damper in a stovepipe and which controls the
amount of gasoline vapor going in to the engine, will be seen in the
upper pipe.
Fig. 22—A Typical Four-cylinder
Carburetor.

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Asian English: Histories, Texts,

Institutions Myles Chilton

More information about this series at

ISSN 2524-7638 ISSN 2524-7646 (electronic)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

Cover illustration: Contributor: RubberBall/Alamy Stock Photo

This collection of essays started as an extended conversation which then

1 Introduction: Redefining English in Asia

7 Stephen Spender and Japanese Atomic Bomb Poetry

Firas A. J. Al-Jubouri is an assistant professor of English and communi-

Steve Clark is a professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and

in numerous journals including ARIEL, Journal of Commonwealth Liter-

John W. P. Phillips teaches in the Department of English Language and

reception of American literature outside of the United States and on the

Table 11.1 Countries represented in the sample 215

Introduction: Redefining English in Asia

Myles Chilton, Steve Clark, and Yukari Yoshihara

Anglophone literary studies have a long though not at all straightforward

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

language study and an education in science and mathematics. In Japan

In our subtitle Histories, Texts, Institutions the middle term holds

English studies. Assuming a unitary Asian perspective is indeed prob-

of Anglophone literature has heretofore been relatively untouched schol-

In the decade and a half since the publication of English Studies in

underlying positions is to treat any such project with suspicion—just as it

and culturally complex developments occasioned by its establishment in

In “Cultural Diplomacy, Literature(s) in English and Creative Writing

Silliman University Writers Workshop (SUNWW), which was patterned

the Ministry of Education, avoiding the potential for controversy in favor

the campus is no longer a place. Many of the traditional structures of

4. Williams, Jeffrey J. “Introduction: Institutionally Speaking.” The Institu-

British Romanticism in China: Received,

The reception history of British Romanticism in twentieth-century China

Originally published as “British Romanticism in China: Revised in Reception,”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

It then traces the reception of British Romantic literature in the course of

“Romanticism” and Langman

“a country in romance”4 for Wordsworth. The origin of the word refers

Chinese intellectual and cultural figures spent an important stage of their

their appropriateness. His example is “Romanticism” as well: the dictio-

and (2) unrestrained and unconventional, especially in sexual relation-

which these Romantic characteristics are seen as products of their socio-

it is the consequence of the bankruptcy of the kingdom of Reason

The Marxist vocabulary such as “the French Bourgeois Revolution”

and Lin were both key late-Qing disseminators of Western literature,

The Proliferation of Romanticism: The

most important New Culturist manifestos, Hu Shi’s (1891–1962) 1917

represented a reaction against the classic tradition of order, reason, schema-

A closer look at this Romantic generation’s diverse programs of the

a different Shelley, they both appropriated Shelley to promote their own

increasing concern with the masses. Literary revolution, as the Associ-

Revolutionized Romanticism: Communist

You will realize that this is necessary as we want to reduce, as much

Fig. 10—End view of Horizontal One-cylinder Motor, showing piston,

A cylinder is generally mounted on its side in a one cylinder

Fig. 11—The evolution Fig. 12—A regular

Fig. 13—Three positions of a Valve Cam.

Fig. 13 shows three positions of one of these revolving pieces of

Fig. 14—Names of Valve Parts.

Fig. 15—A Piston, Piston Ring, and Piston Pin.

Fig. 16—A section of a Piston, showing location of

Fig. 17—A Four-cylinder Crank Shaft.

Fig. 18—A typical Connecting Rod.