Where Great Writers Gather: Treasures of the British Library

Charlotte Brontë‘s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, secured her status as one of the greatest Victorian novelists. It tells the story of an orphan girl turned governess who overcomes hardships and setbacks to marry her beloved employer, Mr Rochester. It is also a passionate expression of the rights of women who lacked the money and social connections to make their voices heard. Denounced by some contemporary reviewers for Jane’s ‘unchristian’ rebellion against her lowly status, Jane Eyre has been seen since as an archetypal love story, a key text in the feminist canon and a classic example of Victorian Gothic.

The Romantics believed that the healing power of the imagination could enable people to transcend their everyday circumstances and anxieties. This conviction features prominently in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792–1822) ode ‘To a Skylark’, written in 1820.

The Pickwick Papers is a series of written sketches by Charles Dickens about a fictional club founded by one Samuel Pickwick; the sketches were intended to be ‘A record of perambulations, perils, travels, and adventures’.

When D H Lawrence wrote The Rainbow between 1913 and 1915 he was a celebrated young writer on the basis of his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. However, The Rainbow is a departure from its realist predecessor: in its exploration of the unconscious, and of repeated patterns of experience over three generations, it belongs with the work of Joyce and Woolf as one of the great innovative novels of the modernist period. Lawrence’s hopes for it were shattered when it was banned for obscenity on publication, and it was not until several years later that it became widely available, by which time Lawrence had turned his back on the country that, he felt, had rejected him and his work.

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a book of comic verse by the American modernist poet T S Eliot. The works contained are ‘nonsense’ poems in the tradition of Edward Lear, as well as passages of nursery rhyme and popular song.

The Waste Land is arguably the most influential modernist poem of the 20th century. Across the poem’s five sections – ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’ – Eliot presents a bleak picture of the landscape of the contemporary world and its history; ‘the most important personage’, as he put it, is ‘the old man with wrinkled dugs’ Tiresias, a hermaphroditic character from Greek mythology who is blind, but able to see into the future. The poem was first published in October 1922 in the British journal The Criterion, then a month later in the American journal The Dial, before appearing in book form, firstly in America, where it was published by Boni and Liverlight in 1922, and then in 1923 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf‘s Hogarth Press.

The Pickwick Papers and the making of Charles Dickens

For the first 20 months of its extraordinary career, the book that the world now knows as The Pickwick Papers – the most popular work of British fiction in the 19th century, and a comic masterpiece that in a very real sense made its author’s name – did not look much like the imposing brick

Sounds in The Waste Land: voices, rhythms, music
The Waste Land is crowded with voices and music, from ancient Hindu and Buddhist scripture to the popular songs of the 1920s. Katherine Mullin listens to the sounds of T S Eliot‘s poem.

Presences in The Waste Land
T S Eliot‘s The Waste Land is full of references to other literary works. Seamus Perry takes a look at four of the most important literary presences in the poem: Shakespeare, Dante, James Joyce and William Blake.

Translation and Reception of Percy Bysshe Shelley in China

Incantations such as ‘If Winter comes, Can spring be far behind’ have given many Chinese the joy of hope, even in the darkest hours.In fact, odd lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘The Cloud’ would at least ring a bell with almost all college-educated Chinese, even if they have not actually read or tried to commit to memory these wildly popular lyrics in English or Chinese translations. Longer works such as Adonaïs, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci and The Revolt of Islam have all received their share of attention too. Shelley may not quite be one of the greatest Western authors known in China – in the league of Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dante – but he is certainly one of the best known and most iconic, a lofty position he initially reached  during the first half of the 20th century. This article tells the story of the translation and the reception history of Shelley in China since he was first introduced to Chinese readers in 1902.

From the Thames to the Yellow River:
The Translation and Reception of English Literature in China

Western literature was first introduced to China by Christian missionaries. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was translated into classical Chinese in 1853 by a Scot, William Chalmers Burns. Twenty years later, Li Shao translated Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Night and Morning, which was published in the literary magazine Yinghuan Suoji; this was the first piece of English literature translated by a Chinese person. Following these early pioneers, a number of intellectuals from the late Qing/early Republican period started to translate Western literature and publish commentaries and literary criticism specifically about English literature. These young and ambitious Chinese were determined to use translated Western literature to overthrow the old system and traditions, and invoke new and forward thinking.

Translation and Reception of the Brontë Sisters in China

Even though Chongguangji (‘See Light Again Story’) condensed and scaled down the famous novel Jane Eyre, this is apparently the first Chinese translation of any of the works of the Brontë sisters. Translated by Zhou Shoujuan in 1925, this novel is included in a collection published by the Shanghai Dadong Publishing House. Since then, Jane Eyre has been translated in many different editions; for instance, Wu Guang Jian and Li Jiye both translated Jane Eyre in 1935, Wu Guang Jian finishing the abridged translation in the novel titled Gu Nv Piaoling Ji, and Li Jiye releasing a full-length translation in serial form in the journal Shijie Wenku.