I’d never heard of this book – Ma Wei Slope (Macmillan: 1944) – a palace intrigue novel set in the Tang Dynasty by Keith West. The detective novel features a rather drunken Li Po (Li Bo, the poet), palace girl Winter Cherry, her lover Ah Lai, and rows between the emperor and farmers. It got broadly good reviews in 1944 and this copy below is a later republication by Penguin in their trademark cover. I’m afraid I know nothing of the author, Keith West – one newspaper declared ‘he knows China…’, but quite how Iam not aware?
Until Andrew West (no relation) sent me the following:
“Keith West, the Oxford trained schoolmaster, who travelled extensively in the Yunnan and South China regions and whose hobbies have been collecting Chinese bronzes and embroideries” (China Monthly vol. 6, 1944, p. 30)
This edition of Penguin Plays (produced mostly for schools and amateur dramatic groups who needed script and play ideas). Hsiung Shih-I’s Lady Precious Stream (1934) was included in this 1958 edition. I’ve blogged about Hsiung before – friend of Chiang Yee, Belsize Park resident, playwright. You can listen to my BBC radio documentary on Hsiung and the other Hampstead Chinese of the 1930s here, there’s also Diana Yeh’s excellent book on Hsiung, The Happy Hsiungs (HKUP/RAS China) and Da Zheng’s A Glorious Showmanif you want more on Hsiung.
Lu Xun and World Literature by Xiaolu Ma and Carlos Rojas (Hong Kong University Press) continues the trend to incorporating Chinese contemporary literature into global modernism (as per Anne Witchard’s Lao She in London)….
In Lu Xun and World Literature, Xiaolu Ma, Carlos Rojas, and other contributors examine various aspects of Lu Xun, who is known as the father of modern Chinese literature. Essays in this book focus on Lu Xun’s works in relation to the notions of world literature and processes of literary worlding. The contributors offer detailed analyses of Lu Xun’s own literary oeuvre and of foreign works that engage with his writings. This volume also focuses on many facets of the publication and dissemination of Lu Xun’s works’, from printing and binding to the discussions and debates that followed their release in China and abroad. This book not only makes an important contribution to the field of Lu Xun studies, but also proposes a reexamination of the category of world literature.
Xiaolu Ma is assistant professor of humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Carlos Rojas is professor of Chinese cultural studies and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University.
Wallis arrived in China in 1924, right in time to pick up the new Thomas Cook’s guide published that year. Their Peking office was in the lobby of the Grand Hotel de Pekin where she was staying.
Arthur Vale Casselman’s 1953 It Happened in Hunan was published by the Board of International Missions, Evangelical and Reformed Church (Philadelphia). I think it’s about the 1920 famine raged throughout Hunan and killed an estimated two million Hunanese. Riots occurred and several missionaries were murdered. Casselman’s life revolved round the Huping Christian College Campus of the missionary-founded Lakeside College, near Yochow (now Yueyang). But I don’t know much about this so if anyone knows the book, or Casselman, better let me know?
