The Encounter between Cambridge Literary Criticism and China

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to study the impact of Cambridge Literary Criticism (CLC) on Chinese scholars, since the visit to Peking’s Tsinghua University by Prof. Igor Armstrong Richards, the initiator of CLC, in 1929, until present times. That first encounter signed the beginning of a fruitful intercultural communication activity between the two countries, which lasted for a decennial. Those contacts between the British literary world, imbued with the scientific spirit that was the basis of ‘Cambridge Criticism’, was very stimulating for the Chinese academic world, of that was being born. Unfortunately, those contacts were forcefully interrupted in 1939, in the raging of the anti-Japanese war. They resumed, with fruitful results, toward the end of last millennium, when the Chinese government issued a “Program for Education’s Reform and Development in China”. In present times the new movement of ‘Ethical Literary Criticism’ is developing in China by initiative of Prof. Nie Zhenzhao, from Peking’s ‘Central China Normal University’, who took inspiration from the works of the Cambridge literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis.

Ethical Intercultural Communication between the Western World and China

“…As for the Chinese literary world, during the first part of the 20 th century the writer and literary critic Lu Xun (鲁迅) and other colleagues of the "New Culture Movement" (新文化运动 Xīn wé nhuà yùndòng), as Zhou Zuoren (周作人) and Hu Shi (胡适) among others, were fighting against Confucianism, with the purpose of contributing to the cultural modernization of their country. They engaged themselves in promoting the adoption of a Chinese vernacular language in literature, Lu Xun utilized the Peking"s dialect, the "Báihuà" (白话) in his novels, replacing the "Wényán" (文言 classical language), not accessible to the common people; they also performed an intense translational activity of western literary works, into Chinese (Ha, 2019).…”