Global modernisms are marked by tremendous transformations in lifestyle, historical consciousness, cultural values, ethics, wars, and crises. This book emphasizes modernist connections within literature, culture, history, and media beyond the nation state and the bifurcation between East and West. Instead of deconstructing and separating, Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe composes and forges new combinations, linkages, and translations that place Chinese and European modernisms on an equal footing. This book features contributions on James Joyce, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anna Seghers, Qian Zhongshu, Weimar labor modernism, Chinese wartime literature, Chinese movies in divided Germany, and Sinophone modernity among other subjects.
Biography
Chunjie Zhang is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. She works in the areas of eighteenth-century studies, postcolonial studies, global modernisms, and cosmopolitanisms. She is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Northwestern University Press, 2017), which delineates a transcultural discourse from the 1750s to the 1830s and highlights non-European impact on German travel writings, dramas, Robinsonades, philosophy of history, and theory of geography. Zhang has published on Goethe, Herder, Kant, George Forster, radical Enlightenment, and the representations of China in Europe. She is also coeditor of “Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures,” a special issue of Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies (2018).
