This book, Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950, celebrates the life and work of Chiang Yee (1903–1977), a Chinese writer, poet, and painter who made his home in London, England during the 1930s and 1940s. It examines Chiang’s relationship with his circle of friends and colleagues in the English capital, and assesses the work he produced during his sojourn there. This edited volume, with contributions from eleven distinguished scholars, tells a story of a Chinese intellectual community in London that up to now has been largely overlooked. It portrays a dynamic picture of the London-based émigré life during the years that led up to the war and during the conflict that was the catalyst for many of them moving on. In addition, the book broadens our understanding of cultural interactions between China and the West in Hampstead, one of the most vibrant artistic communities in London. ‘The collected essays convey a striking portrait of a community of Chinese intellectuals in England during World War II and how it interacted with cultural elites in London and elsewhere both as artists and as anti-fascist activists. As a whole, the volume makes significant points about how people claim status as “authentic” interpreters of a cultural tradition, a process that can pit friends against each other.’ —Kristin Stapleton, The University at Buffalo, SUNY ‘In this delightful collection of essays, a team of experts in literature, history, and the arts bring to light a world of literary interconnectedness and wartime collaboration seldom explored in scholarship. The perfect resource for anyone who values the humanistic common ground between the East and the West.’ —Jenny H. Day, Skidmore College

A young man arrives in England in the 1930s, knowing few words of the English language. Yet, two years later he writes a successful English book on Chinese art, and within the following decade publishes more than a dozen others. This is the true story of Chiang Yee, a renowned writer, artist, and worldwide traveler, best known for the Silent Traveller series--stories of England, the United States, Ireland, France, Japan, and Australia--all written in his humorous, delightfully refreshing, and enlightening literary style. This biography is more than a recounting of extraordinary accomplishments. It also embraces the transatlantic life experience of Yee who traveled from China to England and then on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University, to his return to China in 1975, after a forty-two year absence. Interwoven is the history of the communist revolution in China; the battle to save England during World War II; the United States during the McCarthy red scare era; and, eventually, thawing Sino-American relations in the 1970s. Da Zheng uncovers Yee's encounters with racial exclusion and immigration laws, displacement, exile, and the pain and losses he endured hidden behind a popular public image.

Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the cultures of British modernism and international communism. Born of a national turn in world politics, these novels met the turbulence of mid-century history with narratives of national becoming, roadmaps to situate their readers in the pattern of social change. Their writers were often mindful of the genre's romantic-era heritage: they saw themselves as following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, culture, and tradition. This book shows how the impulse to salvage traces of ancestral culture and press them to new purpose links the mid-century national-historical novel to the rise of radical social history and magical realism. Post-war anticommunism shaped a tradition of the novel as a preserve of art and the individual. Mid-Century Romance counters with a different genealogy of the British and world novel, whose object is society and the future of community, the nation and its people. It situates its cast of British writers--including the modernists Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf, the communists Jack Lindsay and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the eccentric modernist and sometime fellow traveller John Cowper Powys, and the New Left luminary Raymond Williams--in a transnational perspective that reaches from Bihar, India to Bahia, Brazil.

Cultural China is a unique annual publication for up-to-date, informed, and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. It builds on the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre Blog, providing additional reflective introductory pieces to contextualise each of the eight chapters. The articles in this Review speak to the turbulent year that was 2020 as it unfolded across cultural China. Thematically, they range from celebrity culture, fashion and beauty, to religion and spirituality, via language politics, heritage, and music. Pieces on representations of China in Britain and the Westminster Chinese Visual Arts Project reflect our particular location and home. Many of the articles in this book focus on the People’s Republic of China, but they also draw attention to the multiple Chinese and Sinophone cultural practices that exist within, across, and beyond national borders. The Review is distinctive in its cultural studies-based approach and contributes a much-needed critical perspective from the Humanities to the study of cultural China. It aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about the social, cultural, political, and historical dynamics that inform life in cultural China today, offering academics, activists, practitioners, and politicians a key reference with which to situate current events in and relating to cultural China in a wider context.

This book examines Chinese films made and shown abroad roughly between the 1920s and the 2020s, from the beginning of the international exchange of the Chinese national film industry to the emergence of the concept of soft power. The periodisation of Chinese cinema(s) does not necessarily match the political periods: on the one hand, the technical development of the film industry and the organisation of translation in China, and on the other hand, official relations with China and translation policies abroad impose different constraints on the circulation of Chinese films. This volume deals with the distribution and translation of films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora. To this end, the contributors address various issues related to the circulation and distribution of Chinese films, including co- productions, agents of exchange, and modes of translation. The approach is a mixture of socio- cultural and translational methods. The data collected provides, for the first time, a quantitative overview of the circulation of Chinese films in a dozen foreign countries. The book will greatly interest scholars and students of Chinese cinema, translation studies, and China studies.

The Reception of Chinese Art Across Cultures is a collection of essays examining the ways in which Chinese art has been circulated, collected, exhibited and perceived in Japan, Europe and America from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first. Scholars and curators from East Asia, Europe and North America jointly present cutting-edge research on cultural integration and aesthetic hybridisation in relation to the collecting, display, making and interpretation of Chinese art and material culture. Stimulating examples within this volume emphasise the Western understanding of Chinese pictorial art, while addressing issues concerning the consumption of Chinese art and Chinese-inspired artistic productions from early times to the contemporary period; the roles of collector, curator, museum and auction house in shaping the taste, meaning and conception of art; and the art and cultural identity of the Chinese diaspora in a global context. This book espouses a multiplicity of aesthetic, philosophical, socio-cultural, economic and political perspectives, and encourages academics, students, art and museum practitioners to re-think their encounters with the objects, practices, people and institutions surrounding the study of Chinese art and culture in the past and the present.

Chiang Yee's account of London, first published in 1938, is original in more ways than one. Not only one of the first widely available books written by a Chinese author in English, it also reverses the conventions of travel writing. For here the "exotic" subject matter is none other than London and its people, quizzically observed as an alien culture by a foreign writer.

Featuring over 450 archival photographs and line drawings, Chinese Dress traces the evolution of Chinese clothing from court and formal costumes to the fashions of modern China. A comprehensive and sumptuously illustrated book, Chinese Dress is the essential reference for costume historians, fashion designers and collectors, as well as lovers of beautiful clothes everywhere. Chapters include: Dress of the Qing Manchu Rulers 1644-1911 Dress of the Manchu Consorts 1644-1911 Attire of Mandarins and Merchants Attire of Chinese Women Republican Dress 1912-1949 Clothing of the Lower Classes Clothing for Children Dress in New China 1950-2006 From Imperial robes to foot binding to the cheongsam, Chinese Dress spotlights traditional Chinese dress against a background of historical, cultural and social change, opening a fascinating window for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of China, Chinese culture and Chinese fashion history.

This book, first published in 1935, examines the world of Chinese painting: the background, styles, audience and reception, intentions and achievements. Written with a Western readership in mind, it intends to put Chinese visual art in the perspective of its history and culture, and clarify its ideas and meanings.

Translating Chinese Culture is an innovative and comprehensive coursebook which addresses the issue of translating concepts of culture. Based on the framework of schema building, the course offers helpful guidance on how to get inside the mind of the Chinese author, how to understand what he or she is telling the Chinese-speaking audience, and how to convey this to an English speaking audience. A wide range of authentic texts relating to different aspects of Chinese culture and aesthetics are presented throughout, followed by close reading discussions of how these practices are executed and how the aesthetics are perceived among Chinese artists, writers and readers. Also taken into consideration are the mode, audience and destination of the texts. Ideas are applied from linguistics and translation studies and each discussion is reinforced with a wide variety of practical and engaging exercises. Thought-provoking yet highly accessible, Translating Chinese Culture will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of Translation and Chinese Studies. It will also appeal to a wide range of language studies and tutors through its stimulating discussion of the principles and purposes of translation.