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 a selection 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 and activating
heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy
Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren,
Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang 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. By means of its own focus on
England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists
working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes
the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary
studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and
global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to
analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural
transformations of early twentieth-century China.
