Jane Austen's one hundred years in China.

Zhang, Helong

JANE AUSTEN has been one of the most widely read writers in English for nearly two centuries, but she remained completely unknown to Chinese readers for more than one hundred years after she published Sense and Sensibility in 1811. To explain this phenomenon, we must look back to the social, historical, and cultural milieu in China in the nineteenth century. According to historians at home and abroad, the Opium War between England and China in 1840 marked the end of ancient China and the beginning of modern China. As a consequence of successions of foreign invasions and civil disturbances, China began to decline tremendously in almost every aspect. Chinese intellectuals and other elites in the nineteenth century, who used to think proudly of China as the Great Central Kingdom (or Empire), came to realize, on account of China's repeated defeat and humiliations, that they had to learn the advanced industrial technologies, or the political, legal, and social systems in the West that they thought were highly superior. As a matter of fact, Western cultures and literatures were not their priority at all. They had been so proud of the great glory of ancient Chinese literatures that they looked down upon Western literatures until translator, poet, and essayist Lin Shu (1852-1924), together with other intellectuals, began at the end of the nineteenth century to introduce foreign literatures to Chinese readers. [1]

In the whole of the nineteenth century, very few Western literary works were translated into Chinese, and most of those works were translated by foreign priests and missionaries who visited or stayed in China for religious reasons.

For example, William Muirhead (1822-1900), an English Protestant missionary who served with the London Missionary Society during the late Qing Dynasty in China, translated John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress into Chinese with the help of some unknown Chinese intellectuals in 1851. [2] It has been regarded as the earliest Chinese version of a Western literary work. According to Shen and Guo, John Milton's "On His Blindness" was the first English poem ever translated into Chinese, possibly by Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857), an English Congregationalist missionary to China, and published in The Chinese Serial (the first Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong) in 1854. [3] It was not until 1873 that Li Shao Ju Shi, a Chinese-born translator, translated Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1841 Night and Morning into Chinese and published it in Ying Huan Suo Ji, or Around the World, the first literary magazine in Shanghai (also the first literary magazine in China). [4] References to English literary giants like William Shakespeare and John Milton could only be seen occasionally in a few Western geographic or historic books translated into Chinese, or in the diaries and notes of Chinese visitors to the West. [5] The first wave of translating Western literatures in modern China did not begin until 1898 when Lin Shu, the first pioneering Chinese translator, achieved huge success and unexpected fame by translating and publishing The Lady of the Camelhas (Camille, by the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, fils, 1848). In 1901 Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated by Lin Shu and Wei Yi (1880--1930), the first American novel translated into Chinese. As can be seen, Chinese readers in the nineteenth century remained thoroughly unfamiliar with many big names in British literature, including Jane Austen.

It was not until 1917 that Jane Austen was first mentioned to the Chinese reader. Wei Yi, one of the few Chinese translators at the turn of the twentieth century, published Brief Profiles of Famous Western Novelists, a pamphlet-like book in which Jane Austen was hailed as "one of the celebrated English novelists"; Sense and Sensibility topped the list of her "four major novels" (22). In the first two decades of the century, almost no other scholars paid any attention to Jane Austen, let alone attempted to translate her works into Chinese. Wei himself had translated many Western works, mostly in collaboration with Lin Shu, who didn't know any foreign language but who translated more than one hundred English and American literary works into Chinese with the help of more than a dozen bilingual interpreters, including Wei. These translations proved very influential. The authors Lin translated included Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but none of Jane Austen's novels was included in their undertaking.

There are two main reasons for the absence of Jane Austen in early twentieth-century China. First, 1900 was the year when eight allied forces occupied Beijing; in 1911 the Qing Dynasty collapsed, and the country was plunged into wars and other disturbances. Early Chinese intellectuals like Lin and Wei were interested in novels that could help to reform society, strengthen a weak country, encourage the patriotic passion of the Chinese reader, or simply serve the commercial purpose of publishers. Austen's novels only concentrated on socalled "daily triviality," which was of no interest to them at all. Second, early translators and scholars were usually neither college professors nor specialists in English literature; they depended on the recommendations of certain nonexperts whose English was more fluent and proficient. Their choice of authors to be translated was usually made on condition that these authors were either long-established in English literature, or had just achieved great success at the moment of their translation. As Jane Austen was neither the former nor the latter, those translators and scholars paid no attention to her and failed to recognize the particular significance of her works.

In the 1920s, Wang Jing's A History of English Literature (1920, the first history book of English Literature in China), Zeng Xubai's English Literature (1928), and Lin Huiyuan's A History of English Literature (1929) uttered not a word about Jane Austen. In 1927, Ou Yanglan, a teacher of English Literature at Beijing University, compiled A Short History of English Literature, a course book that applauded Austen as a "distinguished novelist" comparable to Walter Scott, and gave a brief introduction: Of all her six novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma are most celebrated. They are all great works that describe social life, or recount countryside events. Her novels are less quickly developed than Scott's, but more delicate in characterization. As Scott says, the events, or incidents, even of the simplest kind, are elegantly written, and highly appealing to the reader. (152)

This is the longest paragraph devoted to Jane Austen ever written in China at that time. Zheng Zhenduo, another influential scholar and writer in the 1920s, also mentioned Jane Austen in An Outline of World Literary History but only said very briefly that her works have calm irony, delicate characterization, and pleasing style.

The year 1935 witnessed a turn in the translation of Jane Austen. Two Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice were published, one by Peking University Press and the other by Shanghai Commercial Press. Liang Shiqiu, a distinguished modern writer and scholar, in a preface to Dong Zhongchi's version, began to discuss the subject matter of the novels, explaining that Austen tried to seek meaning in ordinariness. Yang Bing, the translator of the second version, recognized the humor and irony in Pride and Prejudice, and defined it as a novel of "family-focused irony" (11).

The year 1935 also witnessed the publication of a long essay by Chert Quan, a professor at National Wuhan University, "The Comic Elements in Jane Austen's Novels," the first and also the only scholarly paper that concentrated exclusively on Jane Austen before 1949. Citing works of Henri Bergson, literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and Shakespeare, Chert sought to show that comic works depend on human reason rather than sensibility, and that, as a great comic writer, Jane Austen reached the essence of comedy.

Thirdly, in the 1930s, Jane Austen's name began to appear as an important novelist in some academic books, for example, Xu Mingji's A History of English Literature (1933), Xie Liuyi's The Development of Western Novels (1933), and Jin Donglei's An Outline of English Literary History (1937). Xu's brief account represents a general understanding of Jane Austen under many aspects: subject matter, style, characterization, satire, innovation, artistic achievements, etc. What Xie and Jin contributed to China's understanding of Jane Austen was the view of Jane Austen as a great realist who vividly depicted the country life of England, rather than as a romanticist, like her contemporary Walter Scott. This view" was re-emphasized by some scholars in the 1940s, when wars raged in China and criticism of foreign literature declined. It was re-echoed in the 1950s and the 1980s. One pleasing fact was that Jane Austen's Emma was translated and published in 1949.

In the first half of the twentieth century, China's New Literature emerged, benefitting by translating, accepting, and learning from Western literatures under the influence of the New Culture Movement of the 1910s. [6] Modern Chinese writers, like Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Xu Zhimo, and Zhou Zuoren, were greatly influenced by English writers like Byron, Shelley; Dickens, and Scott, but Jane Austen was never an author who interested them or whom they studied.

In 1949, with the founding of the People's Republic of China, Marxism became the only dominant political ideology. The translation of foreign literature focused on literary works from socialist countries like the Soviet Union and on critical realists or revolutionary Romantics like Dickens and Byron in Western countries. Modern writers like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, or William Faulkner were simply condemned as "decadent," "corrupt," and "reactionary." In 1956, Soviet critic Alexander Anikst's A History of English Literature, which never mentioned Jane Austen in discussing the English novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was translated and published in China. The book exerted decisive influences upon the study of English literature in the 1950S and early 1960s in China. On the one hand, Jane Austen's novels were not like the modernist ones, which were condemned severely and forbidden to be published; on the other hand, her works were not artistically similar to those of Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens, highly celebrated and prolnoted as social realist art in China. Jane Austen seemed to be "a middle person" between modernists and socialist realists, and thus delicately poised in her lopsided position between both positive and negative reception.

In 1956, a third Chinese version of Pride and Prejudice was published and has been one of the most influential of all Austen translations in China. (Northanger Abbey got its Chinese version two years later.) In order to justify the translation, translator Wang Keyi, in an introduction to the Chinese edition, referred to Jane Austen as "an English classic and realist writer" (1). It was intelligent and wise of him to highlight the "progressiveness" of the novel while admitting the particularity of her condemned subject matter, that is, the depiction of "trivial family affairs" rather than great societal or historical events. Obviously, Wang catered to mainstream Marxist ideology and ultraleftist literary views to a certain degree, but his work still represents a positive response to Jane Austen.

Pride and Prejudice, however, became a target for severe criticism and condemnation. In 1965 Dong Hengxun, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, published an article entitled "The Description of Love in Pride and Prejudice" in a national newspaper, The Guangming Daily. He thought that the significance of"a love novel" lay in the degree to which "social contradictions," or great social problems, are reflected through the descriptions of love and marriage; as the issue of love and marriage in Pride and Prejudice has overwhehningly dwarfed the expose of "social contradictions" in a bourgeois country, the novel is politically problematic and thus artistically insignificant. Unlike modernists who were condemned and forbidden in the 1950s, however, Austen was blamed only for being narrow-minded and isolated from her times because she just described three or four families in a country village. Dong says condemningly, 'Austen's fictional world is particularly small. When we read her works, we have no way to feel the pulse of her times."

Jane Austen's reception, along with the reception of almost all other foreign writers, was interrupted for over ten years by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which literally paralyzed the development of China's infrastructure and superstructure. It was not renewed until the death of Chairman Mao and the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976. However, the political bias against Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen continued into the early 1980s. Zhu Hong, another scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in the early 1980s reflected the complexity of this attitude in his essay "The Pride and Prejudice against Jane Austen": Austen was never mentioned in the past in China without being regarded as one who described a narrow life and trivial affairs but turned a blind eye to the English War against Napoleon.... It's no wonder that she's been dwarfed by many first-class writers in Western countries. For a long time in our country, Austen has remained in the background under a severe look of disapproval, and failed to land a position among those Western Classic Works that have been pinned down for translation and publication in China. When the Gang of Four came into power during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), her name was simply deleted from the history of English Literature. (42)

Zhu Hong, on the one hand, endeavored to redefine the value of Jane Austen in China by citing the fact that both the novel and film of Pride and Prejudice were highly popular in China, simultaneously justifying its subject matter, which had long been criticized. On the other hand, he subjected Jane Austen to the Marxist class analysis he had inherited. In an introduction to a reprinted edition of Pride and Prejudice, he pointed out that, in spite of the trivial family events depicted, "the small world in the novel reflects big problems. The tiny occurrences of three or four families in the countryside reveal the class situation and economic relations of English society" ("Introduction" 3-4). In Zhu's eyes, love and marriage in the novel indicate the prevailing inclination to be possessive in a capitalist society in which economic relations play a decisive role and marriage relations amount to nothing more than a kind of financial deal. This perspective is very close to what Engels said of marriage and the family in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), a book that was popular and widely accepted in China.

In 1979, in fact, China entered a new era as the policy of reform and opening up to the outside world began to take the country into a period of great economic success and prosperity. The 1980s saw another great wave of translating foreign literatures. All six major novels of Jane Austen had their own Chinese editions: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility each had more than three. Major journals on foreign literatures published more than thirty critical essays on her works. Almost everyone began to view Jane Austen as a major classic novelist.

The ultra-leftist point of view didn't disappear in the 1980s, of course, and some kind of mechanistic or bigoted critical approach continued to exist. In 1982, Chen Jia repeated the class-based analysis in A History of English Literature that Jane Austen's fiction is flawed because "she has entirely ignored the stirring scenes of growing contradictions and conflicts between the laboring people and the ruling classes in England" and "failed to make any representation of the social and political conflicts of the time" (146). Zhu Hong was the first to point out a long-standing paradox concerning China's reception of Jane Austen: that its mainstream official ideology denigrated her works while ordinary readers and viewers were in fact extremely fond of them; her works had been sacrificed to the need to cater politically to some critical theory. He was also the first to advocate for the view that the estimation of a work should depend on its artistic achievement and that thus Jane Austen's art is timeless. Yang Jiang, another scholar and translator, remarked that the value of a work is not solely determined by its subject matter, and that Jane Austen displays the highest wisdom and knowledge about human nature, whose various aspects she depicts with shining wit and humor.

One of the most controversial issues that attracted scholars was whether Jane Austen belonged to the school of eighteenth-century realism or to early nineteenth-century romanticism. Though she lived in an age that linked realism and romanticism, Chinese scholars, somewhat influenced by the mainstream ideology of the past, inclined to define the nature of her works as realistic. Yang Jiang holds that Pride and Prejudice is a realistic novel, rather than a romantic one. Gu Jiazu praises her as a distinguished English realist, whereas some others deny the label of realism or anti-romanticism while admitting her romantic tendency. Chen Jia's A History of English Literature and Liu Bingshan's A Short History of English Literature, two influential academic works widely used at colleges in the 1980s, include Jane Austen respectively in the Romantic movement and under Realism. On the other hand, Qian Zhenlai refuses to define her as either realist or romantic, but considers her as belonging to no particular school but to all time.

In fact, the critical responses to Austen during this period also involved the exploration of themes, irony, language and style, plot, characterization, narrative, etc. As regards themes, some scholars continued to identify marriage and money as two important themes in her works, pointing out that Austen was the first to explore social reality from women's point of view. On the other hand, Hou Weirui, a distinguished scholar at Shanghai International Studies University, attempted to expose how the narration and dialogue, structure and style in Pride and Prejudice create satirical and dramatic effects. Hou's literary stylistics was also applied to the analysis of Persuasion. Sun Zhili, translator of another influential version of Pride and Prejudice, and Lin Wenchen showed interest in Sense and Sensibility with a focus on such issues as satire, parody, irony, characterization, structure, and form.

In 1996, when China joined the World Copyright Treaty, the unauthorized translation of many modern and contemporary writers ceased while classic writers like Jane Austen began to prosper. In 1997, the six-volume Selected Works of, lane Austen was published in Shanghai, and another six-volume Complete Works of Jane Austen was published in Hainan Province. In 1999, Zhu Hong edited and published The Classics of Jane Austen. Major novels like Pride and Prejudice have been translated repeatedly into Chinese. Amazingly, there have been more than fifty Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice, and at least ten of Sense and Sensibility.

In the 1990s, about one hundred essays were devoted to the study of Jane Austen, and for the first decade of this century, the number might be about five hundred. Austen now usually occupies an exclusive chapter in almost every English literary history published in China. There are reasons for such academic prosperity: Jane Austen has been canonized as a result of her continual popularity with Chinese readers and the academic studies undertaken by Chinese scholars in the past two or three decades; the canonization is also a result of the dramatic increase in faculty members (especially female) in the English departments of Chinese universities, a growth resulting from the increased number of college students promoted by the government. All of these factors have contributed to the increased number of critical essays. Of all these essays, some are academically significant while others (usually by very young scholars) simply parrot issues explored before, either suiting Anglo-American scholars' ideas to a Chinese perspective or importing them whole cloth.

One of the strongest critical strains is the social and historical approach to Jane Austen, as Marxist criticism has been highly developed in socialist China and has remained the dominant critical approach over several decades. Chen Wei's essay "The London Butterflies and the Imperialist Eagle," one of the best, compares Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre by placing Darcy and Rochester, the two male heroes, in their own social and historical contexts, revealing how the ideal male in English society has undergone changes and what social and political elements have caused them. Chen Wei, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has gone beyond many other Chinese scholars who in the past decades approached foreign literatures usually in a dogmatic or mechanistic way, and smartly combined both a close reading of the two works and a profound analysis of the social and historical context.

Feminist criticism is another important perspective that has been employed to explore Jane Austen's works. Qiu Yin's essay "Austen and English Women's Literature" is one of the most impressive. Qiu, Professor at Shanghai University and the translator of Persuasion, holds that Austen is an important feminist predecessor to modern women writers, one who promotes women's liberation in her works; but what is paradoxical is that her works inevitably mix both rebellion against and conformity with patriarchal society. Su Gengxin, a scholar at Beijing University, argues in his essay "The Ideological Temptation: The Female Characters in the Novels of Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen" that Jane Austen is hardly a feminist novelist because her works in fact represent a kind of reactionary response to the burgeoning feminist movement by tempting her readers to accept patriarchal ideology or conform to the established political and social order through the mechanism of "virtue rewarded" on the part of her major characters.

Western critical theories began to swarm into China in the 1980s and became important sources of interpreting and analyzing Jane Austen in the 1990s. Zhang Jieming, a scholar in Shanghai, enlightened by the French school of narrative theory, discusses the narrative features in Pride and Prejudice, interpreting its dramatic qualities in terms of objectivity, spatial and temporal concentration (or compression), and inner logic. As Zhang comments, "For the past years, critics have only paid attention to her humor and irony, her economy and reason, but have failed to recognize her efforts to conceive her fiction as an artistic whole" (109).

Chinese critics have been keeping an eye on overseas criticism of Jane Austen since the early 1980s. In 1985, Zhu Hong edited and published Jane Austen Studies, a collection of twenty-five Anglo-American critical essays. In 1987, the first volume of Annette T. Rubinstein's The Great Tradition in English Literature: From Shakespeare to Shaw was translated into Chinese, and published with a new subtitle, "From Shakespeare to Jane Austen." In 1998, Marilyn Butler's Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 was translated and published in Chinese. Wang Haiying's 2001 essay 'An Ideological Dispute on Jane Austen" is a Chinese critical response to the controversial issue of ideology in Anglo-American studies of Jane Austen.

In a very recent essay entitled "The War of Ideas in Sense and Sensibility" (2010), Huang Mei, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has directly borrowed terminology from Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas as a response to Anglo-American criticism of Jane Austen, but, instead of discussing the novel in terms of conflicting ideas represented by its major characters, she has probed deeply another important issue, that is, the social roles and behavioral norms of ordinary people in an acquisitive society that began to emerge in the eighteenth century. According to Huang, this longdebated issue had been inherited from Jane Austen's literary predecessors, such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson, but Austen demonstrated, through the characterization of the two Dashwood sisters, a kind of utopian attempt to resist such an acquisitive society.

In spite of some groundbreaking achievements in critical studies in the new millennium, it is noteworthy that there have been a huge number of superficial and simplistic approaches to Jane Austen. The unprecedented boom in Austen studies in contemporary China is attributable to both the great leap in degree programs and the unreasonable administrative requirement for the output of scholarly publication. Another noteworthy phenomenon is that, according to a survey in an e-database of M.A. theses in China, nearly three hundred M.A. theses have been devoted to the study of Jane Austen in the past decade, whereas another thorough search both online and by library shows that only two Ph.D. dissertations have discussed her works: Xu Libing's 'An Intertextual Reading of Jane Austen's Novels" (Shanghai International Studies University, 2008) and Shao Yi's "Rewriting and Constraints: A Study of the Chinese Translations of Pride and Prejudice from a Feminist Perspective" (Hong Kong Baptist University, 2007).

A third noteworthy phenomenon is that, since Jane Austen's novels continue their huge popularity in China, highly commercial interest as well as serious scholarly interest has been inevitably involved in her translation and publication. For example, apart from several dozens of simplified Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice and her other works, Maggie Lane's Jane Austen's World: The Life and Times of England's Most Popular Author, Syrie James's The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, and Dominique Enright's The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen have also been translated into Chinese. These translations aim at nonacademic readers and mainly serve a commercial purpose. Janet Todd's The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen published in an English edition in China, particularly for the research of Chinese scholars, serves as an example of serious scholarly interest.

A final interesting fact worth mentioning is that about eighty percent of the M.A. students, Ph.D. candidates, and young faculty members in the English departments of China's universities are female while about eighty percent of its professors of English literature are male. When it comes to producing book-length critical studies, the research interest of these professors has not been Jane Austen--so far. The large number of young scholars in China, however, may indicate a burgeoning of Jane Austen criticism in the coming two decades.

WORKS CITED

Chen, Jia. A History of English Literature. Beijing: Commercial P, 1982.

Chen, Quan. "The Comic Elements in Jane Austen's Novels." Journal of Tsing Hwa University 2 (1935): 359-408.

Chen, Wei. "The London Butterflies and the Imperialist Eagle: From Darcy to Rochester." Foreign Literatures Review 1 (2001): 14-23.

Dong, Hengxun. "The Description of Love in Pride and Prejudice." The Guangming Daily 12 Sept. 1965.

Dong, Zhongchi, trans. Pride and Prejudice. Peking: Peking UP, 1935.

Gu, Jiazu. "What Jane Austen Likes and Hates in Pride and Prejudice." Foreign Language and Literature 3 (1984): 44-48.

Hou, Weirui. "The Art of Language in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice." Journal of Foreign Languages 4, (1981): 1-8.

Huang, Mei. "The War of Ideas in Sense and Sensibility." Foreign Literatures Review 1 (2010): 176-92.

Jin, Donglei. An Outline of English Literary History. Shanghai: Commercial P, 1937.

Lin, Wenchen. "The Inner and Outer Structures in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility." Foreign Literatures Review 1 (1988): 107-08.

Ou, Yanglan. A Short History of English Literature. Peking: PUP, 1927.

Qian, Zhenlai. "On Jane Austen." Theoretic Studies in Literature and,4rt 1(1988): 44-52.

Qiu, Yin. "Jane Austen and English Women's Literature." Journal of Shanghai University 6 (1996): 28-33.

Shen, Hong, and Guo Hui. "The First English Poem Translated into Chinese Should be John Milton's 'On His Blindness.'" Journal of Foreign Literatures 2 (2005): 44-53.

Su, Gengxin. "The Ideological Temptation: The Female Characters in the Novels of Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen." Foreign Literatures Review (2002): 70-80.

Sun, Zhili. 'After Reading Sense and Sensibility." Journal of PLA Foreign Language Institute 1 (1983): 60-63.

Sun, Zhili, trans. Pride and Prejudice. Nanjing: Yilin P, 1990.

Wang, Haiying. 'An Ideological Dispute on Jane Austen." Foreign Literatures Review 2 (2001): 102-09.

Wang, Keyi. "The Translator's Preface." Pride and Prejudice. Shanghai: New Literature and Arts P, 1956. 1-18.

Wang Keyi, trans. Pride and Prejudice. Shanghai: New Literature and Art P, 1956.

Wei, Yi. Brief Profiles of Famous Western Novelists. Association of Popular Education Studies, 1917.

Yang, Bing. "A Critical Introduction to Jane Austen." Publication Weekly 135 (1935): 9-11.

Yang Bing, trans. Pride and Prejudice. Shanghai: Commercial R 1935.

Yang, Jiang. "What's the Good of Reading Novels." Literary Review 3 (1982): 128-43.

Zhang, Jieming. "The Dramatic Narratives in Pride and Prejudice." Foreign Literatures Review 2 (1992): 104-09.

Zhu, Hong. "Introduction." Pride and Prejudice. Shanghai: Shanghai Yiwen E 1986. 1-20.

--."The Pride and Prejudice against Jane Austen." The Reading 1 (1982): 42-50.

NOTES

[1.] Lin Shu is best known for his translation of nearly two hundred titles, mostly novels, into Literary Chinese.

[2.] William Muirhead, translator and sinologist, is best known in China for his translation of Thomas Milner's The History of England into Chinese in eight volumes in 1856. He published China and the Gospel in English in 1870. His Chinese name was Mu Weilian ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]).

[3.] Walter Henry Medhurst, translator and sinologist, went to China in the 1830s and acted as an interpreter for the English army during the Opium War in the early 1840s. He founded Mohai Printing House, the first of its kind in early modern China. Before Professors Shen and Gno published "The First English Poem Translated into Chinese Should be John Milton's 'On His Blindness,'" Qian Zhongshu's view" in "The First English Poem Translated into Chinese and Others" (1985) that Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" was the first English poem translated into Chinese (1864) had been widely accepted.

[4.] Li Shao Ju Shi is possibly the pseudonym of Jiang Qizhang, tbe general chief writer of Shen Newspaper in Shanghai, according to Patrick Hanan.

[5.] William Shakespeare was mentioned to Chinese readers for the first time in William Muirhead's 1856 translation of Thomas Milner's The History of England In 1837, the name of John Milton made its first appearance to Chinese readers in Eastern and Western Monthly Magazine (the first magazine founded in Guangzhou in 1833), according to Hao Tianhu.

[6.] "The New Culture Movement" is commonly believed to have begun with the appearance of La Jeunesse, a monthly magazine founded and edited by Chen Duxiu on 15 September in Shanghai 1915. In 1917, in his essay "On Literary Revolution," Chen called for "the New Literature" to replace "the Old Literature" while Hu Shi, another leader of the Movement, specified eight indicators of what exactly such a new literature should be.

HELONG ZHANG

Helong Zhang is Professor of English and Associate Director of the Institute of Literary Studies, Shanghai International Studies University. He is the author of two monographs and thirty critical essays and the translator of three books. His current project focuses on China's reception of Anglo-American Literature.