Lin Yutang (18951976) was the modern Chinese writer and intellectual best known to the Western world in the twentieth century. Hailed as a Chinese philosopher, Lin was the de facto spokesman for China and Chinese culture and played the role of cultural ambassador between China and the United States. This critical volume, representing the best international scholarship on Lin Yutang studies to date, is a first attempt at a comprehensive study on the cross-cultural legacy of Lins literary practices in and across China and America. The essays collected here, most of which were first presented at the international conference on the cross-cultural legacy of Lin Yutang in China and America held at the City University of Hong Kong in December 2011, offer different perspectives on Lins cross-cultural legacy.

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 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.

Cross-cultural Studies: China and the World, A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Zhang Longxi collects twelve essays by eminent scholars across several disciplines in Chinese and cross-cultural studies to celebrate Zhang Longxi’s scholarly achievements. As a leading scholar from post-Cultural Revolution China, Zhang Longxi’s academic career has set a milestone in cross-cultural studies between China and the world. With an introduction by Qian Suoqiao, and a prologue by Zhang Longxi himself, the volume features masterly essays by Ronald Egan, Torbjörn Lodén, Haun Saussy, Lothar von Falkenhausen, and Hwa Yol Jung among others, which will make significant contributions to Sinological and cross-cultural studies of themselves on the one hand, and demonstrate Zhang Longxi’s friendships and scholarly impact on the other.

Lin Yutang (1895 1976) was the modern Chinese writer and intellectual best known to the Western world in the twentieth century. Hailed as a “Chinese philosopher,” Lin was the de facto spokesman for China and Chinese culture and played the role of cultural ambassador between China and the United States. This critical volume, representing the best international scholarship on Lin Yutang studies to date, is a first attempt at a comprehensive study on the cross-cultural legacy of Lin s literary practices in and across China and America. The essays collected here, most of which were first presented at the international conference on the cross-cultural legacy of Lin Yutang in China and America held at the City University of Hong Kong in December 2011, offer different perspectives on Lin s cross-cultural legacy.

Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning. In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. “Chinese whispers” refers to an American children’s game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect. Taking up various manifestations of the phrase in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values. The book opens with the efforts of I. A. Richards, arguably the founder of Anglo-American academic literary criticism, to promote Basic English in China in the early twentieth century. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa’s famous essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language.

In the early twentieth century, China was stigmatized as the “Land of Famine.” Meanwhile in Europe and the United States, scientists and industrialists seized upon the soybean as a miracle plant that could help build modern economies and healthy nations. Soybeans, protein-packed and domestically grown, were a common food in China, and soybean milk (doujiang) was poised for reinvention for the modern age. Scientific soybean milk became a symbol of national growth and development on Chinese terms, and its competition with cow’s milk reflected China’s relationship to global modernity and imperialism. The Other Milk explores the curious paths that led to the notion of the deficient Chinese diet and to soybean milk as the way to guarantee food security for the masses. Jia-Chen Fu’s in-depth examination of the intertwined relationships between diet, health, and nation illuminates the multiple forces that have been essential in the formation of nutrition science in China.

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng’s wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta—or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources—illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium. Throughout Chinese history, food nostalgia has generated cultural currency for individuals. Feng examines literary treatments of Jiangnan foodways from late imperial and twentieth-century China, highlighting the role played by gender and tracing the contemporary metamorphosis of this cultural landscape, with its new platforms for food culture, such as television and the internet. As communities in Jiangnan refashion their regional heritage, culinary arts shine as markers of ethnic and social distinction.

This wide-ranging Companion provides a vital overview of modern Chinese literature in different geopolitical areas, from the 1840s to now. It reviews major accomplishments of Chinese literary scholarship published in Chinese and English and brings attention to previously neglected, important areas. Offers the most thorough and concise coverage of modern Chinese literature to date, drawing attention to previously neglected areas such as late Qing, Sinophone, and ethnic minority literature Several chapters explore literature in relation to Sinophone geopolitics, regional culture, urban culture, visual culture, print media, and new media The introduction and two chapters furnish overviews of the institutional development of modern Chinese literature in Chinese and English scholarship since the mid-twentieth century Contributions from leading literary scholars in mainland China and Hong Kong add their voices to international scholarship

Lin Yutang's essays on Chinese society and culture were written in both Chinese and English and spanned the immensely influential decades of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In this collection of his seminal work, Yutang confronts the rapid cultural developments of the era and the role that a Chinese intellectual must assume as he shares and translates his native country to the West. Known best for introducing "humour" into Chinese literature and culture, Yutang was a writer of great scholarly and popular interest, reflected in these engaging, substantial, and inspiring works.