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The golden age of Sino-Japanese literary exchange is first described. The writers examined in this book include a number of the most celebrated authors of the era from both China and Japan. Ultimately, although this study explores the relations involving famous writers such as Lu Xun and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, the figure who emerges as the unsung hero of Sino-Japanese literary relations was a little-known bookstore owner named Uchiyama Kanzō, whose bookstore in Shanghai became the hub of relations between writers in the two communities during the interwar period. Brushtalk refers specifically to the practice of communication in East Asia among literate individuals, incapable of speaking one another's language, by means of written classical Chinese. The factors contributing to the ease of interaction between Chinese and Japanese writers in the interwar period are described. In addition, the sordid realities of Sino-Japanese political relations in the interwar period are discussed. The chapter then investigates Chinese and Japanese literary relations during the interwar period from a variety of perspectives. An overview of the chapters included in this book is given as well.

This chapter classifies the choices that each of the writers made in the face of the tensions in the late thirties that led to outright war. The paths that writers trod in the late 1930s, ranging from political activism and collaboration to silence and withdrawal into the relative safety of aesthetics and political disengagement, correspond to the exigencies of that turbulent age. For a brief space of time, during a terrible period of enmity between the two nations, Chinese and Japanese writers succeeded in carving out a charmed space in which they could negotiate questions of modernity, the creation of a new literature, and the role of the writer in the new society. The chapter specifically addresses the breakdown in Sino-Japanese relations that may appear more symbolic than substantive. Topics covered include the League of Leftist Writers, the death of Lu Xun and its significance for Sino-Japanese literary relations, and writers' activities during the war.

This chapter introduces the key figure in literary exchange during the interwar period, Uchiyama Kanzō (1885–1959), and describes how his bookstore served as the unofficial hub for interactions between Chinese and Japanese writers. It also discusses Uchiyama's relationship with Lu Xun. It then evaluates how the relationship between these two men was tested in the fires of political intrigue and scrutiny by the authorities and was strengthened in the process. Without exception, every writer treated in this study was in some way indebted to the efforts of Uchiyama Kanzō at cultural bridging. In conclusion, Uchiyama Shudian, specializing in Japanese texts, including translations, was the finest store of its kind in Shanghai. An examination of Uchiyama's voluminous writings about his life in China provides evidence that he envisioned himself as something of a missionary for the cause of Sino-Japanese cultural relations, and he attacked the duties of fostering cultural interchange and good will with evangelical zeal.

The chapter traces the visions of political and aesthetic progress that informed literary translation and notions of world literature in socialist China. The first part examines 1950s debates on literary translation; the second details editorial practices at the journal Yiwen / Shijie wenxue (Translations / World literature). The third part reconstructs the formation of the system of “internal distribution,” through which foreign literature circulated among elite readers from the late 1950s to the 1980s. The chapter situates Chinese socialist literary culture within a global network of literary exchanges stretching from Cuba to France and from India to the Congo, showing how diverse regions were identified as more or less advanced—politically or literarily—at specific historical junctures. It thus unveils the crucial role of translators in promoting the shift from socialist internationalism to literary cosmopolitanism in the late 1970s.

This chapter discusses the phenomenological roots of hermeneutic studies and forms a link to narratives accounts of identity. It then focuses on a turn in international relations that is concerned with meaning and which is tied into the real world relations of global politics through narratives. It considers the role of radical phenomenology as one of the roots of interpretivism, which in turn has influenced narrative. It also examines the theme of narrative identity and discusses founding events and storied culture. The chapter ends with a section on the literary international relations.

While the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century saw Portuguese and Brazilian writers and intellectuals reaffirm transatlantic cultural and literary ties, critics have tended to disassociate Portuguese and Brazilian modernist movements. This essay questions this cultural rupture of the literary ties and tries to show that while the nature of Luso-Brazilian cultural relations has evolved, literary and intellectual exchanges have been continuous, influencing conceptions in both countries of national and cultural identities. The Orpheu group and other important intellectual and literary figures of the period, both Portuguese and Brazilian, were not averse to a Luso-Brazilian intellectual endeavor, but conceived their modernist and avant-garde projects as joint efforts with platforms and aesthetic goals that would have a transatlantic impact. This paper reevaluates the links between Portuguese and Brazilian early modernist movements, using some productive juxtapositions to rethink Luso-Brazilian cultural exchanges at the beginning of the century.

This concluding chapter discusses the book's overall focus on the literary-visual relation as they appear in media. The visual inhabits the literary in multilayered ways; and, as had been earlier discussed, literary texts often explicitly incorporate filmic techniques. Intermediation is always already part of the textuality of a so-called literary work. It is at once verbal and visual—a summoning that asks for a verbal and visual response. These incorporations and allusions do more than encourage thought about the relations among literature, painting, photography, and film. They are explicit moments in literary texts that open up the ways in which, more generally, words refer to images. Literary works are themselves instances of visual culture; they are verbal-visual texts.

The Introduction provides a summary of Woolf’s musical education, and of her adult musical activities, including her frequent attendance at Covent Garden and private concerts, her membership of the National Gramophonic Society and her regular listening to recorded music. It outlines the repertoire with which she was familiar and her friendships and acquaintances with distinguished musicians; it also considers the role of changing acoustic technologies in her listening practice. It considers the role that music has played in the reception of her work, from numerous contemporary testimonies to the ‘musicality’ of her fiction, to the recent resurgence of interest in literary-musical relations after a long period of critical neglect.

This introduction establishes just how counterintuitive this project is by setting out Whitman’s aggressively anti-British stance in his pre-Leaves years—his pose of transatlantic antipathy. This chapter also situates Whitman within the debate of the 1830s and 1840s over what he called that “terrible query”—can there actually be an American literature? It also presents Whitman’s often flippant early caricature of that “wonderful little island”—England—in his early journalism and Leaves. The chapter ends with a brief assertion of Whitman’s Darwinist notion of literary evolution, to which he would adhere until the end of his life.