Overview

In Fou Lei: An Insistence on Truth, Mingyuan Hu thinks through the life and work of one of modern China’s most significant public intellectuals, investigating his Shanghai-Paris trajectory and his resistance against cultural barbarism. Using hitherto undiscovered archival documents, Hu presents the first study of Fou Lei’s youth, particularly his formative years in Europe (1928–1931), and analyses the critic-translator’s identity vis-à-vis intercultural friendships and political predicaments. Bringing together previously untranslated material in French and Chinese, Fou Lei paints a man in dark times searching for illumination through words, and invites the reader to reconsider questions, unresolved and unspoken, about his tragic end. This volume was originally published in hardback 25 May 2017.

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9781739389703

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Reviews

'A powerfully argued and deeply moving study, linking Shanghai and Paris, of one of twentieth-century China's greatest and most courageous public intellectuals. Uncovering previously unknown primary sources that detail personal relationships in Paris, Hu Mingyuan charts the evolution of Fou Lei's resistance to authoritarianism and the seeds of his tragic demise.' - Claire Roberts, Professor of Art History at the University of Melbourne, author of Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong; 'Now Hu Mingyuan, a Chinese-British scholar, has published this impeccably researched and deeply sympathetic account of the evolution of Fou Lei's mental world. Throughout the book, Hu is never afraid to think laterally and creatively, infusing a lyrical quality into her writing, a quality which lifts her work far above the run-of-the-mill academic studies of modern Chinese culture.' - John Minford, Professor Emeritus of Chinese at the Australian National University, and Sin Wai Kin Distinguished Professor of Chinese Culture and Translation at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong'; 'This is a ground-breaking biography of twentieth-century China's greatest translator. The discoveries rigorously unearthed in Parisian archives by Dr Hu Mingyuan shed an entirely new light on Fou Lei's links to French friends such as Jean Danielou and Rene Etiemble. The reconstruction of Fou Lei's intellectual itinerary through his brotherhood with his authors and heroes, be it Romain Rolland and his Jean-Christophe or Hippolyte Taine and his Philosophy of Art, restitutes for the reader this Insistence on Truth which gives Fou Lei's tragic destiny its true meaning.' - Pierre Barroux, former Consul General of France in Shanghai

Author Information

Mingyuan Hu, Ph.D. University of Glasgow, was Lecturer in Art History at the University of Leeds.

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