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‘No nation has produced more anthologies or collections of women’s poetry than late imperial China’, according to Kang-i Sun Chang. Indeed, the open-access database of Ming–Qing Women’s Writings at McGill University Library includes 5239 women writers and 431 poetry collections. Yet virtually no trace of this phenomenon, or of these women writers, can be found in transcultural literary histories and anthologies of world literature published in the West in the twentieth century and beyond. How is this possible? The reason is not simply the lack of translations of many of the poems, but rather it has to do with the lack of canonization of these women poets in Chinese literary history until the late twentieth century, when they were ‘rediscovered’. This article investigates this neglect with the aim of showing that there were several different reasons for it, related to poetics, genre hierarchies, anthology editing practices, etc., in the imperial era, and to aspects of Chinese literary historiography in the twentieth century. Two women ci poets, Liu Shi and Qiu Jin, are briefly introduced to show that the reasons for their exclusion, as well as their later inclusion in the national literary canon, also need to be addressed on an individual level.

This chapter discuss vernacularization in modern Chinese fiction through an analysis of the vernacular prose in Lao She’s satirical novel Cat Country (1933), using an enlarged timeframe, including the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic in pre-modern Chinese literature to gain a deeper understanding of vernacularization in China in the early twentieth century. In the diglossic socio-linguistic situation in China, the vernacular movement, was not a reaction against the languages of the foreign imperialists, but rather a reaction against the Chinese classical, literary language, wenyan, the major vehicle for traditional culture and Confucianism. The written vernacular, baihua, that developed with demands for modernization and the national-language-nation-building discourse (Hu Shi, 1918) was highly experimental (Zhou, 2011) and influenced by translations of foreign languages into Chinese. However, vernacularization in China was not a case of passive reception of western languages and modes of literary – political communication, thus awarding too little agency to the writers in this process (Liu, 1995), and disregarding the influence of traditional Chinese prose fiction. My study shows that Lao She’s multiglossic vernacular prose fiction, could be seen as a kind of vernacular, “cultural cosmopolitanism from below” (Taraborrelli, 2015), just as vernacular prose fiction in pre-modern times, it developed and thrived due to its close relationship to spoken language and dialect, performative genres and storytelling through processes that can be relevant to consider when theorizing the vernacular in World literary studies. 

Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’ (1918) is regarded as the first instance of modern Chinese fiction written in the vernacular. Rydholm shows how Lu Xun made use of both diglossia and multiglossia in this short story to stage the battle between languages and ideologies at the time, hoping to reform the ‘real’ world.  The narrative structure stages a diglossic battle between the juxtaposed Preface, written in the classical, literary language embodying the traditional, Confucian cosmopolitan worldview, and the Diary, written in the contemporary vernacular, the vehicle of the New Culture Movement’s national-language-nation-building discourse. Rydholm’s study reveals how the binary opposition between the Preface and the Diary is undermined, ideologically and linguistically, by what may be called ‘translingual practice’ (Liu, 1995). Rydholm concludes that Lu Xun thrived in the ‘Shaky House’ (Zhou, 2011), the situation of linguistic experimentation in contemporary literature, and that his literary worlds of multiglossia contributed to the development of a new elite ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ in China to replace the classical, cosmopolitan literary language.

In this chapter, the author traces some influential voices of reformists/writers in manifests calling for fiction written in the vernacular, by the early reformist Liang Qichao, and by reformists within the New Culture Movement, such as Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun, who promoted “modern” Chinese literature written in the vernacular. The aim is to show how their reformist discourse on language and literature is embodied in and confronts traditional values within a work of fiction, Lu Xun’s short story A Madman’s Diary, how this literary work manifests the “power struggle” between the “traditional” classical, literary language and the “modern” written vernacular in China in the early twentieth century.

In Sweden since the 1990s, partly as a response to rapid globalization and cultural exchange, there has been increased interest in cross-disciplinary research cooperation within the Humanities and Social Sciences. Cross-disciplinary research programs also have become increasingly important for Swedish sinologists, especially scholars within the field of Chinese literature, both ancient and modern literature. In this article, I will discuss one of the more influential research programs: Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts (1999–2006), which was financed by the Swedish Research Council. The program enrolled more than 20 scholars from the fields of Oriental Studies (including four sinologists), African Studies and Literature at several Swedish universities. These scholars did comparative research on the notions of literature and genre across times and cultures, and on interactions between literary cultures in the modern world. I will reflect upon the research results on genre theories, and discuss some of my insights gained on transcultural genre concepts and genre grids as a participant in the group of scholars working with genres with a comparative approach within this program. Finally, I will briefly introduce some current cross-disciplinary programs and publications involving Swedish sinologists that have been inspired by this experience of working in large, cross-disciplinary research programs on comparative literature in Sweden, such as the program Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures (2016–2020).

"Mo Yans nya roman är full av berättarlust. Lena Rydholm har läst en fascinerande skröna om ett känsligt ämne"