About

In the early twentieth century, British modernists, including Virginia Woolf, repudiated the onward, linear temporality that was central to Victorian thinking – precisely when the Chinese people were being encouraged to assign it a central role in the modernisation of their nation. The new temporality was formulated in the May Fourth New Cultural Movement (1919), the most significant cultural movement in twentieth-century China, in which the public was urged to replace traditional culture with Western civilisation. This radical innovation is resonant with the Modernist slogan ‘make it new’, which, intriguingly, was the archival language revived by Ezra Pound from ancient Chinese classics. Investigating Modernism’s iconoclastic stance toward Victorianism in a multilingual context, the transhistorical dualism between ‘past and present’ reveals a different interaction.

This project brings together Virginia Woolf, Chinese modernist Ling Shuhua, and Victorian realist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose biography, Charlotte Brontë, Woolf surprisingly recommended to Ling despite elsewhere expressing hostility towards Victorian biographical form. Taking a literary-historical and comparative approach, my research aims to compare the temporalities presented by Gaskell and Woolf. Drawing upon Ling as an intermediary, it aspires to reappraise Woolf’s criticism of Gaskell’s realistic narrative and re-evaluate the cultural inheritance left by the two writers.

What new insights into Woolf’s criticism of the Victorian realistic narrative can be gained by investigating her contradictory attitude towards Gaskell in a global context? And to what extent are nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literary legacies discernible in twentieth-century Chinese Modernism?

By tackling these questions, I will contribute to a deeper excavation of how Victorian and British Modernist narrators were acclimatised to twentieth-century China. Thus, while making contributions to a growing field – temporal globality – the output of my project, like my findings presented in Gaskell’s House (Manchester), also invites people outside academia to engage with these canonical writers.