A. Owen Aldridge, after a distinguished career in the West as a comparatist turned his attention to East-West literary relationships largely as a result of invitations from academic organizations and universities in Taiwan. Devoting his scholarly career to both literature and history, he assumes that these disciplines represent complementary aspects of the same intellectual enterprise. Literature consists of intellectual communication partaking of emotional and esthetic elements; while history involves the recording and interpretation of everything that has taken place in human experience. Both are based upon (1) the written word as reflecting the actual course of events in the world of reality, (2) the recording of these events along with those of the imagination, and (3) observations on the way in which the recording process takes place.

The middle of the eighteenth century saw numerous Europeans in Cochinchina, now part of Vietnam. Travel accounts describing their contacts with the Cochinchinese, the Court, and with one another were written by Pierre Favre, a Swiss cleric; Pierre Poivre and Robert Kirsop, French and British merchants, respectively; and Johann Koffler, a Czech Jesuit at the Court. The rivalries seen in these accounts reflect early European aspirations for influence in the area and foreshadow Vietnam’s fall to France in the following century.

In 1975 the victorious North Vietnamese led their armies into South Vietnam, followed thereafter by the evacuation of American power from Indochina. Since then the fatal battles and barbaric encounters of war have become recurring images in literature and other esthetic productions. The representation of the past involves culture, and the perceptive representation of culture involves historical authenticity. When considered as cultural history, the contemporary British musical Miss Saigon is subject to contrary interpretations. From the perspective of Vietnamese national identity, the work is deficient by failing to represent cultural and historical elements that had caused the physical and emotional torture, but as a musical for Western audiences, the work successfully revives romantic stereotypes contrasting stalwart American fighting men and sexually pliant Asian women.

Among the numerous problems confronting the translation of classical Chinese poetry into English, the one that is probably the most difficult to tackle is the rendering of the subtle, complex relationship between ching, the description of physical reality, known as “scene,” and ch’ing, the expression of human feeling, or simply “feeling.” This paper focuses on the two most common modes of presentation of this central relationship in Chinese poetry and examines the root cause of the difficulties in translating them into English. It finds that the intractable difficulties in translating the scene-feeling relationship into English are, in fact, deeply imbedded not only in the fundamental differences between Chinese and English poetry and poetics, but more significantly, in the philosophical underpinnings that inform these two traditions of poetry. Thus, by way of such investigation, the limits of translation, which may first appear as a negative, can actually be turned into a positive illumination for comparative studies, shedding light on the essential similarities and differences between the two literatures and cultures compared.

Perhaps inspired by H. G. Wells’s methodology in his Outline of History, tracing the development of various religions as historical events without allowing theological interpretations to intrude, a number of Chinese authors in the early 1920s published works based entirely on the human aspects of the life of Christ. These consisted of poems and short stories by both believers and non-believers in the divinity of the founder of Christianity.

Though vastly separated by cultural differences, the autobiographies of Rousseau and Shen Fu share certain stylistic features which can be characterized as the rhetorical and the lyrical. Much of the effectiveness of the Confessions and The Six Records of a Floating Life lies in the rhetorical artifice both employ as well as their lyrical technique. The rhetorical sensibility more clearly dominates the Confessions (often under the guise of the lyrical), while the lyrical sensibility dominates the Six Records (though the results are, rhetorically, very persuasive).

Since Maxine Hong Kingston won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel, The Woman Warrior in 1976, we have been witnessing a “consensual acknowledgement of her as a’ “canonical author.” This national recognition, however, has invited severe criticism from such well-known Chinese American critics as Frank Chin. Chin considers The Woman Warrior as a “fake” book and argues that Kingston, in her representation of the Chinese tradition, conflates the Chinese legend and deviates from the proto-text of Mu Lan. This paper analyzes Kingston’s textual politics in transforming/displacing the original Chinese texts and argues that through appropriation, extension, and deviation from the Chinese tradition, Kingston in effect accomplishes her cultural mission of converting the gender/racial hurt into the hope of Chinese Americans.

One of the main characteristics of the May Fourth Movement is the pursuit of personal freedom and emancipation in order to reform the society and to save the country. Women belong to one of the most oppressed groups and their subjugation has become the most visible sign of China’s backwardness at that time. Lu Hsun, as one of the leading iconoclastic thinkers and writers, spoke for women who were suffering from the conventional customs and beliefs and trying to revolt against them in some ways or others. His short story “Regrets for the Past” is a famous example of the so-called Chinese new woman who emulated Henrik Ibsen’s character Nora to leave her family and pursue her freedom and emancipation. However, what concerns Lu Hsun most is the aftermath of Nora’s brave action. Lu Hstin’s pessimism toward Chinese women’s emancipation is shown in his speech “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home?” delivered in 1923 and his story “Regrets for the Past” published in 1925. Through the analysis of the story, we can see how Lu Hstin changes his perceptions about literature and social reform from the Ibsenian individualism to the leftist or Marxist ideology in order to solve China’s social and national problems. This transformation is typical of many May Fourth intellectuals who start with the discovery of the individual’s suffering and end up with the prescription of collective struggle.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and There Was a Country of Women Far Away by Bai Hua attempted to dramatize the reasons that the French Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution would have failed to bring forth a historical leap forward as envisaged by the leaders of the two revolutions. In A Tale, Dickens suggested that it is perhaps the triumph of hatred over love that frustrated the French Revolution’s struggle against historical determinism. In Country of Women, Bai Hua proposed that it is the suppression of love that defeated the ideals that the Cultural Revolution aimed to realize. For Dickens and Bai Hua, a revolution is too destructive to achieve a constructive end. In order to initiate a genuine social and historical progress, one must resort to the human capacity for love. In these two novels, whether a historical breakthrough can ultimately be achieved by -a revolution or otherwise, women are going to play a determining role. This article demonstrates how Dickens and Bai Hua used their female characters in the histories of the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution to express their faith in love as a weapon to transcend the vicious cycle of history.

This paper reviews the modernist tradition of “the future” with its “presentist” bias in favor of the now and its propensity to favor the future over the past; it also contemplates the future of tradition and the neglect of the importance of tradition in the years to come. The ironies and contradictions of globalism are explored, where “modernization” enhances the comforts of world travel yet, in its destruction of local color, makes it less attractive to travel the world. The concept of “globalization” is advanced, where the global and the local are in equipoise, and the values of both regional histories and global technologies are appreciated in equal parts.