This book provides a comprehensive examination of the socio-cultural and political context of modern China in terms of its interaction with America and the West, focusing on the influence of the well-known Chinese writer and intellectual Lin Yutang (1895-1976). Offering a unique study of the life and works of Lin Yutang, it highlights his intellectual legacy in modern China and considers how his cross-cultural life and ideas embodied the modern Chinese cultural experience. It notably focuses on Lin’s reputation as an outspoken critic of the infringement of human rights during the rise of the Communist regime in China, but also on his rediscovery of Chinese cultural resources. At a time when China’s cultural contributions are increasingly relevant worldwide, this book contributes to ongoing critical reflections of Chinese modernity, particularly in terms of its intellectual legacies, but also to a renewed understanding of the cross-cultural interactions between China and America and a re-opening the dialogue and search for a new cultural understanding.

The Works of Lin Yutang is the first book to provide a comprehensive study of Lin Yutang’s translation theory and translated (and written) works in English as a whole, examined from the perspective of his pursuit of recognition of cultural equity between China and the English-speaking world. The arc of the book is Lin’s new method of translating China to the Anglophone world, which is crucial to rendering Chinese culture as an equal member of the modern world. This book identifies Lin’s legacy of translation and recognition as his acknowledgement of source and target cultural territories in translation, and at the same time, his questioning of perspectives that privilege the authority of either. This book will appeal to scholars and students in Translation Studies, World and Comparative Literature, Literary and Cultural Studies, and Chinese Studies. It can also be used as a reference work for practitioners in translation and creative writing.

This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history.

From 1931 to 1945, as Japanese imperialism spread throughout China, three distinct regions experienced life under occupation: Manchukuo, East China, and North China. Yet despite the enduring importance of the occupation to world history and historical memory in East Asia, Translating the Occupation is the first English-language volume to make available key sources from this period to both scholars and students. Contributors have translated texts from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean on a wide range of subjects. Each is accompanied by a short essay to contextualize the translation and explain its significance. This volume offers a practical, accessible sourcebook from which to challenge standard narratives. The texts have been selected to deepen our understanding of the myriad tensions, transformations, and continuities in Chinese wartime society. Translating the Occupation reasserts the centrality of the occupation to twentieth-century Chinese history, opening the door further to much-needed analysis.

Untamed Shrews traces the evolution of unruly women in Chinese literature, from the reviled "shrew" to the celebrated "new woman." Notorious for her violence, jealousy, and promiscuity, the character of the shrew personified the threat of unruly femininity to the Confucian social order and served as a justification for punishing any woman exhibiting these qualities. In this book, Shu Yang connects these shrewish qualities to symbols of female empowerment in modern China. Rather than meeting her demise, the shrew persisted, and her negative qualities became the basis for many forms of the new woman, ranging from the early Republican suffragettes and Chinese Noras, to the Communist and socialist radicals. Criticism of the shrew endured, but her vicious, sexualized, and transgressive nature became a source of pride, placing her among the ranks of liberated female models. Untamed Shrews shows that whether male writers and the state hate, fear, or love them, there will always be a place for the vitality of unruly women. Unlike in imperial times, the shrew in modern China stayed untamed as an inspiration for the new woman.

This edited volume contains an excellent collection of contributions and presents various informative topics under the central theme: literary and translation approaches to China’s greatest classical novel Hongloumeng. Acclaimed as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, Hongloumeng (known in English as The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone) epitomizes 18th century Chinese social and cultural life. Owing to its kaleidoscopic description of Chinese life and culture, the novel has also exerted a significant impact on world literature. Its various translations, either full-length or abridged, have been widely read by an international audience. The contributors to this volume provide a renewed perspective into Hongloumeng studies by bringing together scholarship in the fields of literary and translation studies. Specifically, the use of corpora in the framework of digital humanities in a number of chapters helps re-address many issues of the novel and its translations, from an innovative angle. The book is an insightful resource for both scholars of Chinese literature and for linguists with a focus on translation studies.

In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon draws on archives from three continents to argue that Overseas Chinese were key to this development, utilizing their global connections and diasporic links to procure much-needed money, supplies, and medical expertise. The remarkable expansion of care and education that they spurred saved more than four million lives and trained more than fifteen thousand medical personnel. Moreover, the introduction of military medicine shifted biomedicine out of elite, urban civilian institutions and laboratories and transformed it into an adaptive field-based practice for all. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort.