Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” View and Christianity: An Encounter and Departure

Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” view which was raised by Zhou before and after “May 4th” Movement, was influenced by Christianity and therefore had a scent of “humanitarian love”. Zhou Zuoren was then dazzled by humanitarian love, but there was still a distance between his thought and Christian thought. This article aims at a discussion about the distance in the spirit of Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” view and Christian humanitarianism which is represented by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and about the reasons for Zhou’s departure from the education of the masses.

Literary Transfers between „Peripheries”: Henryk Sienkiewicz’s The Lighthouse Keeper and the Mediating Role of the Center in the Circulation of Literary Works

The article considers literary transfers between peripheral regions of the world literary map via analysis of the translations into classical Chinese of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s short story The Lighthouse Keeper and Adam Mickiewicz’s Invocation from his epic poem Master Thaddeus by the brothers Zhou Zuoren and Zhou Shuren, best known by his pen name Lu Xun. The description of the plot of Sienkiewicz’s story, with its mapping of the trajectory of Mickiewicz’s poem from its nostalgic Polish setting to a remote island in Central America, turns out to mirror the literary transfers between peripheries that the short story itself took from Poland to the Far East. In considering this circulation of literary works and the poetic transfer between peripheries, the mediating role of the center as conceived of by P. Casanova and F. Moretti is reassessed.

Estrangements of the World in the Familiar Essay

Chapter 3 examines the form of the familiar or informal essay, which flourished in Republican China from the early 1920s until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, facilitated by the vibrant periodical press in metropolitan areas. In a 1921 essay in the Beijing Chen Bao or Morning News, Zhou Zuoren points to a line of Anglo-American essayists from Addison to Chesterton as inspiration for his Chinese contemporaries. What characterizes the familiar or informal essay, as distinct from the critical or polemical essay, is a casual, informal tone, with which the author simulates conversation with the reader as peer and uses occasions in ordinary life as points of departure and topics for reflection. This chapter studies how Charles Lamb, one of the essayists Zhou mentions, and Zhou himself use the medium of the familiar essay to explore the strangeness of the everyday in writings that subtly position London and Beijing within a global network of multiple locations, metropolitan and otherwise.

Nature as Refuge in Chinese Film and Literature

In the period of 1920s and 1930s, traditional Chinese ideas and aesthetics, although embattled and in the process of being superseded by modern and Western aesthetics, did not totally disappear or die out in Chinese film and literature. For example, the image of nature continued to be constructed for its ability to relieve the misery of humanity. This is demonstrated in the films A Poet at the Edge of the Sea (1927) and Sand Washed by Waves (1936). However, because of social turmoil and turbulence of this period, the peaceful inner spirit as conveyed in the traditional culture seemed unattainable. There were more hints of social struggles in the “utopia”, as shown in the films Little Toy (1933) and Return to Nature (1936). The traditional ideas and aesthetics were also continued by some writers, such as Zhou Zuoren, Feng Wenbing, Yu Pingbo and Wang Tongzhao, who still had close spiritual connections with traditional culture. Sometimes the spirit of the “return to nature” was embedded with another mark of this period: the influence of Western culture, as shown by several of Guo Moruo’s poems.