早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 by Tianhu Hao (review)

Reviewed by: 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 by Tianhu Hao Lian Zhang Tianhu Hao, 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 [Essays on early English and comparative literature] (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2022), 330 pp. This review was supported by the National Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation, China (authorization: 21BWW046) In the early nineteenth century, Chinese scholars began to read medieval and Renaissance English literature. Ever since the Imperial University of Peking set up an English department in China in 1903, university courses like English literary history and European literary history have generally included medieval and Renaissance English literature. Studies of medieval and Renaissance literature have gradually developed and prospered since the 1970s, after decades of war turmoil and political movements. Chinese scholars have used their own academic experience and research methods, combined with a unique Chinese perspective, to elaborate their particular viewpoints. Tianhu Hao’s new book offers a vigorous and thorough study of medieval and Renaissance English literature, and suggests new attitudes toward the connection between Chinese and Western literary theories and methods in the twenty-first century. This learned book collects twenty-five essays and takes as its subject the study of early English literature and its reception and translation in China. Hao turns to an impressively wide variety and a formidable amount of evidence—history play, romance, sonnet, miniature painting, epic, commonplace book, English and Chinese lyric poetry, translation, university syllabus, encyclopedia entry, and more—to support his central claim that “medieval and Renaissance studies, in literature, history, philosophy, political science, art history, and history of science, though conducted only by a small group of Chinese scholars, not only has significant academic value, but also contributes to a deep understanding of today’s China and the world, and will effectively promote China’s new cultural construction” (301; translation mine, here and throughout). With its perceptive and original readings informed by a judicious recourse to theories, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of medieval and Renaissance writing and culture and to the history of Chinese and Western comparative literature study. As the title suggests, the role of medieval and Renaissance English literature in Chinese comparative literature study is a central concern of this book. The temporal span of the study is chosen with astuteness: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were the initial periods of relatively deep contacts and exchanges between Chinese and Western culture (300); in the late 1970s, during the period of reform and opening up, Chinese readers warmly affirmed the value of Shakespeare and the epoch-making significance of the European Renaissance, earnestly calling for a new Chinese Renaissance (300–301); in the twenty-first century, the great national rejuvenation of the new era cannot be separated from cultural exchanges between China and the West and the construction of new cultures, as well as from the absorption of outstanding Western cultural heritage, including cultural heritage of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (301). The book’s essays cohere around two subthemes. The first nine essays are persuasive readings of medieval and Renaissance literary texts and cultural events. Each essay addresses a feature of Western medieval and Renaissance studies—from censorship of Sir Thomas More and the performability of history, [End Page 233] the geography of difference in Shakespeare’s romance Pericles, literary pictorialism and Spenser, ethics of scientific creation in Milton and Frankenstein, ethics in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Criseyde, to commonplace reading and writing in early modern England. Attention to theory and philosophy is balanced by a complementary focus on manuscript knowledge, which Hao carefully and vividly explicates in his study of Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden in essay six and essay eight. The next sixteen essays move to a reading of comparative literature and translation works. Hao discusses how medieval and Renaissance English literature were accepted and interpreted in Chinese cultural context, and how medieval and Renaissance cultural concepts have association with Chinese cultural concepts. The essays survey the reception and translation history of medieval and Renaissance English literature in China in the past one and a half centuries, introducing in the field of comparative literature study leading Chinese political and literary figures including Lin Zexu, Gu Hongming, Wu Mi, and Li Funing, and Western scholars including W. A. P...