The Contemporary China Centre presents
LAO SHE: A CHINESE WRITER IN MODERNIST LONDON
A talk by Dr. Anne Witchard
Lecturer in English Literature
Department of English, Linguistics and
Cultural Studies, University of Westminster
Wednesday 7 December 2011
4.30 – 6.30 pm
Westminster Forum
5th Floor, Wells Street building
University of Westminster
32/38 Wells Street
London
W1T 3UW
Chinese cultural and intellectual texts engaged in various ways with Western constructions of
modernism. Of these exchanges and encounters, my focus in this paper will be on the early life and
work of the famous Chinese novelist and short story writer, Lao She (February 3, 1898 - August 24,
1966). Lao She was uniquely positioned in his engagement with specific conditions of modernity and
nationhood both in Britain and in China. By birth a disenfranchised Manchu, he lived and worked in
London during the late 1920s, a period seen as the apex of high modernism and his writing registers
this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his work beyond the parameters of the socialist realist
tradition to which, chiefly because of his proletarian magnum opus, Rickshaw Boy (1936), it has largely
been confined. Reading Lao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subjects and new
styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves also to
unsettle Eurocentric considerations of modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin
unquestionably the metropolitan West.
Anne Witchard teaches in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University
of Westminster. She specialises in representations of China and the Chinese in early-twentieth-century
Britain (see her book Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of
Chinatown, Ashgate, 2010; and most recent of various papers, a chapter in the collection Chinatowns in
a Transnational World, Routledge, 2011). Her book Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution
will be published in Autumn 2012 by the University of Hong Kong Press
All welcome
Non-University of Westminster attendees please register with
Dr Derek Hird
Email: [log in to unmask]
For enquiries about the Contemporary China Centre, please contact
Professor Harriet Evans
Tel: 020 7911 5000 ext 7603
Email: [log in to unmask]
Contemporary China Centre
Department of Modern and Applied Languages
University of Westminster
309 Regent Street. London, W1B 2UW
www.westminster.ac.uk/asian-studies
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