“Wide-ranging and erudite.” —American Historical Review (October 2006)

“An important study, one that specialists will return to again and again and that should be read by all interested in modernity and its global dimensions.” —Journal of Asian Studies

“Masterful ... Huters shows how both well- and less-known intermediaries between China and the outside world were involved in an active process of critique, along with accomodation.” —Journal of World History (December 2005)

“One of the key books to read on the fervor of the literary and intellectual hybridization that took place between the late Qing and early Republic.” —Keith McMahon, University of Kansas

Bringing the World Home sheds new light on China’s vibrant cultural life between 1895 and 1919—a crucial period that marks a watershed between the conservative old regime and the ostensibly iconoclastic New Culture of the 1920s. Although generally overlooked in the effort to understand modern Chinese history, the era has much to teach us about cultural accommodation and is characterized by its own unique intellectual life.

This original and probing work traces the most significant strands of the new post-1895 discourse, concentrating on the anxieties inherent in a complicated process of cultural transformation. It focuses principally on how the need to accommodate the West was reflected in such landmark novels of the period as Wu Jianren’s Strange Events Eyewitnessed in the Past Twenty Years and Zhu Shouju’s Tides of the Huangpu, which began serial publication in Shanghai in 1916. The negative tone of these narratives contrasts sharply with the facile optimism that characterizes the many essays on the “New Novel” appearing in the popular press of the time. Neither iconoclasm nor the wholesale embrace of the new could square the contradicting intellectual demands imposed by the momentous alternatives presenting themselves.

Theodore Huters is professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA.

Read the introduction (PDF).