Scientific Themes in the Popular Literature and the Poetry of the German Enlightenment, 1720-1760. Walter Schatzberg

Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Despite being an integral part of the Chinese literary scene, their bestselling fiction has, however, been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This book is the first extensive study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other Western language and it re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. Their romantic novels and short stories were often set abroad and featured a wide range of stereotypes, from pirates, spies and patriotic soldiers to ghosts, spirits and exotic women who confounded the mostly cosmopolitan male protagonists. Christopher Rosenmeier’s detailed analysis of these popular novels and short stories shows that such romances broke new ground by incorporating and adapting narrative techniques and themes from the Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s, notably Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying. The study thereby contests the view that modernism had little lasting impact on Chinese fiction, and it demonstrates that the popular literature of the 1940s was more innovative than usually imagined, with authors, such as those studied here, successfully crossing the boundaries between the popular and the elite, as well as between romanticism and modernism, in their bestselling works.

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Imagining the Sudan in British Film, 1925–53

Journal of British Cinema and Television ◽

10.3366/jbctv.2020.0532 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (3) ◽

pp. 334-354

Author(s):

Zach Bates

Keyword(s):

British Empire ◽

Popular Literature ◽

The Political ◽

Complex Picture ◽

The Relationship

Due to its status as a territory under the joint rule of Egypt and Britain, the Sudan occupied an awkward place in the British Empire. Because of this, it has not received much attention from scholars. In theory, it was not a colony, but, in practice, the Sudan was ruled primarily by British administrators and was the site of several developmental schemes, most of which concerned cotton-growing and harnessing the waters of the Nile. It was also the site of popular literature, travelogues and the most well-known of Alexander Korda's empire films. This article focuses on five British films – Cotton Growing in the Sudan (c.1925), Stark Nature (1930), Stampede (1930), The Four Feathers (1939) and They Planted a Stone (1953) – that take the Sudan as their subject. It argues that each of these films shows an evolving and related discourse of the region that embraced several motifs: cooperation as the foundation of the relationship between the Sudanese and the British; Sudanese peoples in conflict with a sometimes hostile landscape and environment that the British could ‘tame’; and the British being in the Sudan in order to improve it and its people before leaving them to self-government. However, some of the films, especially The Four Feathers, subtly questioned and subverted the British presence in the Sudan and engaged with a number of the political questions not overtly mentioned in documentaries. The article, therefore, argues for a nuanced and complex picture of representations of the Sudan in British film from 1925 to 1953.

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