The Transnational Itinerary of the Sympathetic Reader

Abstract This essay calls attention to “sympathetic reading”—the idea that reading fosters sympathetic connections between readers and characters and, in turn, prompts readers to seek social change—as a particular transnational modality in early twentieth-century China. Tracing how Protestant ideals of sentimental readerly mobilization encountered already established Chinese theories of emotive reading, the argument sheds new light on a transnational theory of readership that was yoked to the Chinese modern project of nation building. The essay demonstrates this argument by charting the connections between Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the translation and popularization of which in China was inextricably bound up with the Protestant missionary civilizing project; and Family by Ba Jin (Jia 家, 1933), one of the most widely read novels in modern China.