Overview

The book traces the literary journey that Proust’s work made to China and back by means of translation, intertextual engagement, and the creation of a transcultural dialogue through migrant literature. It begins with a translation history of Proust’s work in China and studies the different (re)translations and editions of La Recherche highlighting their culturally conditioned thematic emphases and negligence, such as time and memory over anti-Semitism and homosexuality. The book then moves on to explore three contemporary mainland Chinese writers’ creative intertextual engagement with Proust against the backdrop of China's explosive development from modernity to post-modernity in the 1990s. Finally, back to France, the book examines the multifarious literary relations between Proust and the Franco-Chinese migrant writer François Cheng. It demonstrates how the cultural heritages of China and the West can be re-negotiated and put into dialogue through the fictional and creative medium of literature, as well as providing a means of understanding the economic, political, and cultural exchanges in our current global context.

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9789811351426

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Reviews

“Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement is a study that deals with a vast array of concepts, references, corpora and languages in order to provide a prismatic vision of a core problem: how can we understand the main traits of the reception and recreation of La Recherche by Chinese translators and writers? … Shuangyi Li allows the reader to feel relatively comfortable even though some of the themes covered in his book might be entirely original or unfamiliar to some readers.” (Yuri Cerqueira dos Anjos, OCCT Oxford Comparative Criticism Translation, October 25, 2019) “Shuangyi Li has produced an engaging, distinctive work of scholarship that makes a welcome addition to Proust studies while also contributing to a range of other fields. It brings a critical assessment of Proust’s reception in China into dialogue with theoretical thinking about diaspora, translation, canon-formation, intertextuality, and the transcultural. It is a stimulating read, enriched by the use it makes of existing critical writing on Proust’s novel as well as a wider spread of work in translation studies, world and comparative literature, and intertextuality.” (Adam Watt, French Studies, March 16, 2019)

Shuangyi Li has produced an engaging, distinctive work of scholarship that makes a welcome addition to Proust studies while also contributing to a range of other fields. It brings a critical assessment of Proust's reception in China into dialogue with theoretical thinking about diaspora, translation, canon-formation, intertextuality, and the transcultural. It is a stimulating read, enriched by the use it makes of existing critical writing on Proust's novel as well as a wider spread of work in translation studies, world and comparative literature, and intertextuality. (Adam Watt, French Studies, March 16, 2019)

Author Information

Shuangyi Li is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Lund University in Sweden. Besides Proust, he is interested in 20th-century European and global modernism(s), transcultural writings by writers of Far Eastern Asian diasporic communities, processes of international canonization, reception studies, translation studies, travel writings, and critical models of world and comparative literature. He is currently working on a project on literature and art of the Chinese diaspora in France within the broader framework of cultural translation and intermediality. 

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