On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Lit Z)

"On the Horizon of World Literature is an outstanding, original, and groundbreaking book. Sun shows how asynchronous and historically unrelated works can be brought together for mutual illumination. Sun's comparisons take into consideration the historical significance of texts as responses to modernity and their very existence as products of historical forces that shape what we understand as modernity. The author's ambition in treating texts as fields of interlocking developments marks the book's originality." -Wai-Yee Li, Harvard University

"Emily Sun's pathbreaking book bridges early twentieth-century Chinese literature and early nineteenth-century British literature in an entirely original and convincing way. By building this remarkable, two-way literary dialogue-across cultures, periods, and continents-Sun reawakens the promise and the necessity of comparative literature, as a unique discipline with new stories still to tell."-Alex Woloch, Stanford University

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by "world literature" as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided-and continues to provide-a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization.

The book offers readings of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds.

Sun's book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles.

Emily Sun is Visiting Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College.