Harvard East Asian Monographs, 380. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. xii, 429 pp. (Illustrations.) US$59.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-50435-6.
Perhaps because of its relatively short history, the political novel as a literary genre has rarely received attention from academia. Fortunately, Catherine Vance Yeh’s carefully crafted monograph, The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre, sheds light on this long neglected yet unique literary form. Centred on its development in China in the waning Qing period (1890s–1911), Yeh’s meticulously detailed research explains why the political novel, despite its “foreign origins,” was able to thrive in the twilight years of the Chinese empire. Her thought-provoking analysis of the powerful impact of political novels on China’s “Reform of Governance” movement deepens our understanding of the close relationship between literature and its social, economic, and political environments, and the latter’s influence on literature within a transnational and transcultural context.
The book is thematically composed of two parts. The first part contains two chapters that cover the broad background of the political novel, especially its development as a “world genre.” It was works by Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), who twice served as the British prime minister, and writers in Europe and North America that first formed the “core” of the genre with its distinctively political imprint in the mid-19th century. The dramatic increase in the spread of goods, ideas, and institutions across national borders facilitated the rapid migration of the political novel as a new form of literature to East Asia—first to Japan and then to China.
Part II, consisting of five chapters and titled “Bringing the World Home: The Political Novel in China,” elaborates the crucial role played by this literary genre in promoting political and socio-cultural progress in China as well as its successful adaptation in Chinese literature. In chapter 3, Yeh explores the meaning of the “Japanese model” and its influence on writers of political novels in China. Clearly, translation functioned as the key player in promoting the transcultural flow of the literary genre from Japan to China and helped build a bridge connecting Chinese writers with their counterparts in other countries. It was from the Japanese translation that most Chinese writers learned about Western political novels. Inspired by the Japanese model, Chinese reform-minded scholar-writers such as Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929) first translated Western political novels from Japanese and then started creating their own brand of these works in Chinese. Even the Chinese term zhengzhi xiaoshuo (“political novel”) was directly “borrowed” from the Japanese kanji “seiji shosetsu” (56).
Chapter 4 examines the institutional environment that brought about the prosperity of the political novel in East Asia. The genre first settled and prospered in Japan after the Meiji Restoration (1868) as Japanese reformers sought to use political novels to “enlighten” the general public and to further Japan’s emergence as a modernized country in East Asia. Similarly, the new genre reached China at a time when Chinese intellectuals were in search of a new and popular literary form to advance their political agenda. The social and linguistic environments in China in the 1890s provided the genre with a “new public sphere” for its rapid growth. It in turn served as a peculiarly effective “tool” for Chinese writers to mobilize society at this critical moment to accomplish their mission of the “Reform of Governance.” As Yeh points out, it was the desire of Chinese reform-minded intellectuals to use political novels to win public support that led to the rising popularity in Chinese society of this Western form of writing.
Chapter 5 discusses the specific contributions made by political novels in advocating a wide range of Western-style political and socio-cultural reforms in China. The effort to improve the fate of women is a case in point. Having been influenced by the concept of female equality preached in Western political novels, Chinese reformers maintained that the fate of women reflected that of the nation—it was “a key marker of the degree to which a country lived up to the ‘standard of civilization’” (265). It was no accident that the notorious Chinese practice of foot binding was gradually abolished in the 1910s.
Chapter 6 examines the practice of casting Western-style heroic figures in Chinese political novels. Writers in China looked to the new literary form to introduce to the public Western leaders, from George Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte, along with scientists and police detectives, as icons of modernity and progress. The powerful influence of political novels in China thus also lies in the dramatic and exotic casting of fictional heroes, based on remodeling or adaptations of their counterparts in Western fiction. In Yeh’s words, a fervor among Chinese readers for fictional Western-style heroic figures in political novels, who represented new values and ideas, “brought the world home” (312).
The final chapter discusses the function of the “wedge chapter,” which was a distinctively popular feature in political novels in China. It was a literary device to attract readers, employed by traditional Chinese novelists at the beginning of their stories. Liang Qichao used the practice in writing his first political novel in 1902. This trope was followed by other Chinese writers, a clear demonstration that transcultural interactions were essential for the growth of this Western literary genre in China.
The Chinese Political Novel is a brilliant transcultural study and contextual analysis of the relationship between literature and society in a transnational environment. It expands the knowledge base, not only of scholars of Chinese literature, but also that of students interested in transcultural studies of literature throughout the world. By placing the development of political novels in China in a global context and employing a transnational and multilingual approach, Yeh answers a critical question: why and how the political novel became immensely popular in China and acted as an agent of change, bringing reforms to Chinese society. As she concludes, the transnational movement of political novels and their flourishing moment in China is more than the cultural spreading of the literary genre itself, but “the migration of ideas and social thought” (160), reflecting the influence of Western culture on the Chinese modernity movement. In this sense, the development of Chinese political novels was part of a global trend, and its prosperity in Wan Qing China can be viewed as “the beginning of the beginning of the modern Chinese novel” (315).
Xiao-huang Yin
Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA
Rui Xue
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
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