Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution – Shanghai RAS – 13/11/12

Posted: November 8th, 2012 | No Comments »

RAS LECTURE

Tuesday 13th November 2012 at 7.00pm – starts 7.30pm prompt

Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xingguo Road, Shanghai

Anne Witchard

author of Lao She in London 

the first of the 

RAS Shanghai’s China Monographs

Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution

 

 

Lao She remains revered as one of China great modern writers. His life and work have been the subject of volumes of critique, analysis and study. However, the four years the young aspiring writer spent in London between 1924-1929 have largely been overlooked. Anne Witchard, a specialist in the modernist milieu of London between the wars, reveals Lao She’s encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce. Lao She arrived from his native Peking to the whirl of London’s West End scene – Bloomsburyites, Vorticists, avant-gardists of every stripe, Ezra Pound and the cabaret at the Cave of the Golden Calf. Immersed in the 1920’s West End world of risqué flappers, the tabloid sensation of England’s “most infamous Chinaman Brilliant Chang” and Anna May Wong’s scandalous film Piccadilly, simultaneously Lao She spent time in the notorious and much sensationalised East End Chinatown of Limehouse. Out of his experiences came his great novel of London Chinese life and tribulations – Ma & Son: Two Chinese in London. However, as Witchard reveals, Lao She’s London years affected his writing and ultimately the course of Chinese modernism in far more profound ways.

Anne Witchard is Lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate Publishing, 2009), co-editor with Lawrence Phillips of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (Continuum, 2010) and editor of Chinoiserie and Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

 

“A beautifully written book that combines literary biography with a remarkably succinct account of British modernism and an evocative portrait of interbellum London.”

            Julia Lovell, Birkbeck College, University of London

“Witchard’s wonderful weaving of Chinese and British intellectual lives with the horror engendered by characters such as Dr Fu Manchu is a fascinating reminder of how attitudes and prejudices needed to change.”

            Frances Wood, Curator, Chinese Collections, British Library

“This perceptive and engaging book explores the London years and writings of one of China’s finest twentieth century novelists… fiction and essays he wrote in Britain teach us new ways to understand 1920s London, Anglo-Chinese relations, and the transnational world of modern literature.”

            Professor Robert Bickers, Department of History, University of Bristol

 

RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

ENTRANCE:  80 (RAS members) and RMB 130 (non-members).

Includes one drink: 150ml glass of red or white wine/draft beer/soft drink/ tea or coffee.

PRIORITY BOOKING for Members until 10th November 2012.

MEMBERSHIP applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

RAS MONOGRAPHS – Series 1 & 2 will be available for sale at this event. 100 rmb each.

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