Finding Shaw Among His Irish and Chinese Contemporaries (<i>The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters</i>)

As promised in its title, Simone O’Malley-Sutton’s The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters is a rare examination of the connection between the literature around the May Fourth Movement in China in 1919 and the Irish Literary Revival in Ireland (1900–1922). The spirit of the May Fourth Movement, often considered the Chinese Renaissance, was anti-colonial, sparked off by massive protests of Chinese students against the Republican government’s weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, which allowed Japan to retain territories in Shandong, a coastal province in northern China. The Irish Literary Revival, known also as the Irish Literary Renaissance or the Celtic Twilight, also marked a period of strong political nationalism with a revival of interest in the heritage of Gaelic literature, language, and culture. O’Malley-Sutton’s impressive volume reads the Irish Revivalists such as W. B. Yeats, Seán O’Casey, Lady Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, and John Millington Synge and the Chinese May Fourth generation authors like Lu Xun, Lao She, Qiu Jin, Ding Ling, and Cao Yu as Modernist writers who are linked by the fight against the forces of capitalism and coloniality.The book’s epigraph is a quotation from Sean O’Casey’s 3 November 1957 letter to Ronald Ayling in which he states: “Shaw was a fighter; and he knew I was one too.” Among other scholars, Peter Gahan has detailed Shaw’s role in the Irish Literary Revival,1 but the playwright also played a crucial role in the young Chinese intellectuals’ conception of New China, who used him to fight against the limiting traditional values of imperialist China. Although Shaw doesn’t occupy the limelight of this study, O’Malley-Sutton threads her book with discoveries of Shaw’s influence, mentioning his 1933 visit to China, the admiration Lu Xun and Cao Yu had for him, and that Xun’s library included “Shaw’s Talks.” Considering Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God a postcolonial feminist text, she further shows how the Chinese writers linked Shaw and Yeats, although the former was inaccurately labelled as English rather than Irish in a Chinese museum just as Synge was considered a modern English/British dramatist in the Nanda Banyuekan 南大半月刊 (Nanjing University Semi-Monthly) in 1933.O’Malley-Sutton, who speaks fluent English and Chinese and lived in Beijing for six years, is well-positioned to chart reciprocal influences and mutual transformation, specifically how the Irish Revivalists influenced the Chinese May Fourth writers as anti-colonial writers and fighters, and how in turn Asian influences circled back to influence Irish Revivalism.2 The Chinese intellectuals translated plays by Yeats, Gregory, O’Casey and Synge, which were then performed and published in literary journals as efforts calling for social reform. In due course, Yeats, Gregory, Synge, and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics.O’Malley-Sutton structures her book with chapters devoted to five pairings of writers: W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Lu Xun (1881–1936); Seán O’Casey (1880–1964) and Lao She (1899–1966); Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), and Qiu Jin (1875–1907); Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926) and Ding Ling (1904–1986); and John Millington Synge (1871–1909) and Cao Yu (1910–1996). According to the author, these comparisons not only show the reception of the Irish authors within the May Fourth cultural and political movement but also throw light on how Irish Revivalist literature was reshaped in the Chinese context and the various cultural and political implications of these reciprocal processes. However, while making these comparisons, O’Malley-Sutton does not lose sight of the fact that the Irish Literary Revival is not identical to the Chinese May Fourth literary movement. She rightly notes that there are points of convergence and divergence. While the Irish Revivalists looked to the ancient past to reinvent a future Ireland different from the one proposed by imperial Britain, the Chinese May Fourth generation determined to uproot the traditional Confucian Chinese past as part of their modernising project to “save the nation.”3 In both cases, the Irish and Chinese were expected to accept colonial modernity (or the version of modernity created by the colonizing forces of capitalism and colonialism) as the only acceptable route to becoming modern.The first third of the book anchors its focus on Yeats. In chapter 2, O’Malley-Sutton compares him with Lu Xun, arguing that the New Modernist and Postcolonial canons should be broadened to include not just white, Irish and European male writers like Yeats, but also Chinese May Fourth writers like Lu Xun from the so-called “peripheries.” She concludes that Lu Xun was a postcolonial modernist, who experimented with new modernist forms of literature to make a radical break with the post(semi)colonial Chinese past. She also argues that Yeats experimented with Modernist literary techniques to break from the problematic colonized Irish past to reimagine a New Ireland. In chapter 3, the author covers Lu Xun’s translations of Irish Revival texts from Japanese, and chapter 4 focuses on the reception of Yeats in China, especially how his works were translated by Chinese May Fourth writers. They were more interested in Yeats’s poetry, drama, and criticism as a model of postcolonial modernity than that of other Irish Revivalist authors, their interest soaring when Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923. O’Malley-Sutton goes on to illustrate how other May Fourth translators appropriate Yeats and Irish Revivalism to address salient issues for their Chinese audience torn between semi-coloniality and a yearning to modernize.Chapter 5 is a study of the transnational anti-colonial literary links between the life and works of Irish Revivalist Socialist dramatist Seán O’Casey and those of left-leaning Chinese dramatist Lao She. O’Casey’s works were translated into Chinese, and Lao She even visited Ireland in August 1928. Malley-Sutton concludes that Chinese Renaissance writers were inspired by the Irish writers’ efforts to decolonize through literature and drama, especially within the context of the global socialist struggle.In chapters 6 and 7, O’Malley-Sutton turns to issues of gender and feminism, contrasting how the New Woman was constructed differently in the postcolonial peripheries within overwhelmingly masculinist nationalist discourses. She contends that female writers in Revivalist Ireland and May Fourth China were consequently required to postpone women’s rights to first establish freedom for the nation. Chapter 6 compares Lady Gregory to poet, feminist, and Chinese revolutionary Qiu Jin who was executed after a failed uprising during the imperial Qing Dynasty. Both suffered an erasure of their literary legacies as “Founding Mothers” coupled with misreadings informed by an exclusively male gaze and a masculinist nationalist discourse, which co-opts, encircles, and limits those liberating discussions of women’s rights. Although Nationalist revolutions open a liminal space for female subjectivity, it becomes circumscribed by problematic hegemonic ideologies of gender, age, race and social class.The discussion of gendered erasures of female writers continues in chapter 7, in which O’Malley-Sutton compares socialist and feminist writers Eva Gore-Booth and Ding Ling who were both regarded as “writers and fighters,” first wave feminists carving out a new role for women during the 1920s and who “constructed postcolonised peripheral New Women in divergent political and socioeconomic settings in Revivalist Ireland and May Fourth China, in a global transnational setting.”4 The author provides reasons why Gore-Booth’s campaigns and activism should have been recognized more, given her great efforts towards women’s suffrage and her campaigns for Irish independence and peace. Likewise, she notices that Ding Ling’s feminist intent was considered inadequate in the 1980s for failing to reach fully Western expectations of second and third-wave feminism.Chapter 8 is a comparison of J. M. Synge and Cao Yu, playwrights who played an instrumental role in establishing a modern national theatre in post-colonized countries. O’Malley-Sutton explores themes in their plays to establish links between the postcolonial condition and Modernist experimentation. Detailing how Synge’s works were received, translated, and critically commented during the Chinese Renaissance, she shows how the May Fourth writers used Synge’s strategies of linguistic hybridity and anticolonial resistance to address their own modern postcolonial Dilemma.In December 1915, former Qing General Yuan Shikai, who had become the second President of the Republic of China, restored the monarchy and proclaimed himself as the Hongxian Emperor (洪憲). Chapter 9 focuses on Ireland’s anticolonial 1916 Easter Rising and examines how Liu Bannong used this event in a New Youth article to provide a revolutionary literary model and alternative route to modernity after the failing of the Chinese Republic. The book’s conclusion argues that the Chinese May Fourth generation and Irish Literary Revivalists were “Postcolonial Modernists.” All in all, The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters supplies lots of valuable new information, previously contained only in Chinese literary journals and archives, and insightful comparative analysis of the writings of members of the Irish Literary Revival and the May Fourth movement.