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During the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties of China identity questions became serious in a society thrown into disorder by political, religious and ethnic problems. This thesis uses three books written in the sixth century to discuss how educated Chinese faced identity problems and how they dealt with them. The Buddhist monk Huijiao, dealt with the problems of sinifying a foreign religion. He constructed many different identities in addition to the Buddhist one for the monks in his book Gaoseng zhuan, (Lives of Eminent Monks), a collection of biographies of Buddhist monks, to bring Buddhism closer to Chinese tradition and more acceptable by Confucian standards. Through the identity construction he also made responses to anti-Buddhist ideas. Yang Xuanzhi's Luoyang qielan ji, (Record of the Monasteries of Luoyang), deals with the identity problems of Chinese officials serving a Xianbei regime in the north and of the short-lived capital of the Northern Wei in Luoyang. Yang reconstructed a Chinese identity for the lost capital as a true heir of Chinese tradition, as were the emperors, princes and officials who lived there. He created an identity defined not by ethnicity but by culture. Yan Zhitui's Tanshi jiaxun, (Family Instruction of the Yan Clan), is a book which tells his descendants how to construct and maintain the future identity of his own family. He drew on his own experience of recovering from repeated political catastrophes to set out an identity that would help the family to survive disordered times and maintain their status in society.

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This thesis examines the 1861 and 1893 editions of James Legge’s (1815–1897) translation of the Lunyu, collected in the first volume of his Chinese Classics under the title, Confucian Analects. Instead of confining Legge in the discourses of orientalism and cultural imperialism, I reread Legge’s encounter with ancient and contemporary China, his reverence for Kongzi (Confucius), and his appreciation of Ruism (Confucianism) as a monotheistic religion relevant to Christianity. I argue that Legge’s Lunyu shows a spirit of intercultural accommodation through his broad incorporation of Chinese and Western sources, unfolding important nineteenth-century sinological approaches while stimulating the modern development of Sino-Western dialogue. The study illustrates the textual identities of the Lunyu through a discussion of Kongzi’s life, the early formation of the Lunyu, the reception history of the Lunyu in China and Europe up to Legge’s time, and the editorial history of Legge’s Lunyu that reflects the text’s rich tradition. The study illuminates the significance of religion in Legge’s evaluation of Kongzi and the Lunyu by charting Legge’s religious background and sinological commitment, while relating modern/contemporary theories of ‘religion’ in the West and China to his approach to Ruism. Within these contexts, I show how Legge connects Christian thought to Ruist ethics through his vision of ‘universal love’. Adopting Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, I analyse Legge’s rendition of the title through his correlation between the Ruist, Graeco-Roman and Christian traditions, his translation of ren (perfect virtue, benevolence and love), xiao (filial piety), zhong (faithfulness and sincerity) and li (the rules of propriety), and his revisions. Moreover, to reveal how Legge develops a universal Ruist theology based on his Sino-Christian perspective, I examine his interpretation of Tian (Heaven), Di and Shangdi (both referring to the Supreme Ruler, equivalent to Christian God according to Legge) in ancient Ruist literature, and the way Legge relates these terms to relevant passages in the Lunyu. I elucidate Legge’s sympathetic account of Zhu Xi as a theistic thinker, probing his use of Zhu’s commentaries on ‘learning’, ‘perfect virtue’, ‘transcendence’ and the attributes of God in the Lunyu. In sum, the thesis demonstrates the interreligious, dialogic and intertextual dimensions of Legge’s Lunyu, highlighting its nuanced intercultural values.

The period following the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 was one of rapid economic and social change in China. It created conditions favourable for the development of the New Culture Movement which started during the Great war, and reached its climax in 1919.Two of the basic features of this movement were the introduction of ideas from the West and the reassessment of Chinese traditions from the standpoint of those ideas. The Literary Revolution was an integral part of the New Culture Movement, which, after an initial period of discussion and debate, undertook the task of building a new Chinese literature with a new humanist or revolutionary content, and with forms copied from, or inspired by. Western literature. The problems which this task of construction involved were many and varied. During the next few years the literature of many periods and countries was introduced into China, and the new writers experimented with numerous forms. Ultimately, those which accorded most closely with the needs of Chinese literature, and especially with the social conditions and demands of the Chinese revolution, which had a determining influence on it, were successfully adopted, and fused with the Chinese tradition. The writer who best succeeded in mastering these problems of selection and synthesis was Lu Hsun, who, while benefiting from the example of Western writers, especially Russian, at the same time retained a Chinese character and style, not only through the subject matter of his work, but also from his knowledge and keen appreciation of old Chinese literature.

This thesis deals with the plays by Gao Xingjian - a Chinese contemporary playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2000 - and Martin Crimp a contemporary English playwright. The plays from both authors will be looked at from a comparative perspective within the theoretical framework linked to the debate between modernism and postmodernism, as inspired by Calinescu's theory. Calinescu's theory is based on the idea that Postmodernism is a 'face of modernism': he speaks about recurrent aspects ('similarities') of Modernism in Postmodernism, not only in terms of the repetition of patterns from the past in the present culture, but in terms of a natural historical evolution of Modernism into new cultural forms. The aim of this thesis is, therefore, to prove Calinescu's idea of continuity between Modernism and Postmodernism through the work by the two playwrights and by doing this it inevitably demonstrates a link between two writers coming from two different continents, hence a connection between Eastern and Western Literature. This thesis carries out an investigation into the two \vriters' dramatic texts and searches for signs of modem and postmodern elements and highlights how these elements coexist. In particular, in each chapter the thesis will carry out a close reading analysis of one or more plays by each author: in the case of Gao, we focus on post-exile plays, written after he left China in 1986 and are analysed chronologically; in the case of Crimp, the plays in question are not in strict chronological order but almost in parallel order to Gao's plays as they were written from the 1990s up to the present day.

Michel de Montaigne believed that to judge a man, we must follow his traces long and carefully. This chronological study of Fou Lei (1908-1966) traces, firstly, his footsteps as a cogent critic of art, literature, music and politics, and as the most accomplished translator of French literature in China of the twentieth century, and secondly reveals a fraction of an intellectual labyrinth meandering through China’s fragmented modern history, almost Oedipal in its disposition towards its past, and its tragic love relations with the West, real or envisioned. Fou Lei the translator of Balzac and Fou Lei the art critic have been the subjects of recent scholarly work of Nicolai Volland and Claire Roberts. This thesis proposes an intellectual biography of Fou Lei and commences, by necessity, with a narrative of his youth – especially the years he spent in Europe – which he himself scarcely mentioned, and the analysis of which is sorely missing in existing literature. Hitherto unpublished documents that I discovered in France and Switzerland contribute to this biography. A close examination of Fou Lei’s early, especially emotional, life is made with the purpose of contextualising his subsequent moral and existential choices. These choices in turn are historicised through his writing, translation and correspondence. Archival findings in Paris lend significant insight into the agony in which he lived during his last years in China, where political predicaments alone were responsible for his death. There are two dimensions to this investigation: intellectual and linguistic. A recurring theme is that of parallels, and a sustained inquiry that of how to reconstruct, then deconstruct, the process of cultural translation and appropriation. Allowing the material to dictate my treatment of it, I make as my focus the internal life of an individual against external conditions. Fou Lei, who chose to live a strictly sedentary life in response to his circumstances, justifies and demands this treatment. Squarely through the point of view of an intellectual who made sense of external and internal realities by way of rigid dichotomy, I obliquely challenge generalised ideas, in particular those of this intellectual himself. I thereby draw attention to the specific thought process of his generalising and the possible ways of understanding it, throwing into question the linguistic instability inherent in these efforts. Under psychological considerations, pre-supposed categorisations dissolve. The ingenium of an individual scrutinised in a given historical situation makes specific the notion of “culture” in a defined context, itself routinely entangled not least semantically. Other than situating Fou Lei, where necessary, in his social milieu, I make apparent, and give accent to, a milieu of words, one with indistinct geographical and temporal boundaries, to glimpse the mental world of a multilingual literatus, the devotion of whose entire adult life was to the craft of language. For the same reason that a thesis on Joseph Conrad might not be expected to discuss Poland, I restrain, where possible, inclined elaboration on the elephantine subject that is China in my study of Fou Lei. I hope to illustrate the “obsession with China” – as C. T. Hsia termed it – that he shared with his contemporaries without falling victim myself to that obsession. This individualistically-driven narrative yet serves a historical purpose. It allows Fou Lei himself to take us from a post-revolutionary, post-May Fourth, post-White Terror Shanghai to an inter-war Europe during the Great Depression, and back to a China entering the Sino-Japanese War, then the Civil War, changing thereafter from a Republic to a People’s Republic under progressively totalitarian control, and traversing endless upheavals into the Cultural Revolution. This voyage becomes thereupon itself a witness both to Fou Lei’s desperate interaction with his time, and to his fierce insistence on autonomy. Notwithstanding our way of arguing being by and large linear, in no way should Fou Lei’s journey be conceptualised as so. In a peculiarly three-dimensional manner, there was more a dislocation, or a continuous array of dislocations, that he had to make sense of in relation to his own country, the political signification of which changed several times over in the lifetime of that particular generation, than the easily supposed confrontation and integration between the so-called East and West. What this modern Chinese intellectual, decidedly archaic in his moral standing and profoundly romantic in a nineteenth-century European sense, obliges, is multi-disciplinary research from multiple angles. What this study of his youth, now positioned in relation to his entire life, reveals, are aspirations that were never fulfilled, seeds that never grew. What it portrays is a sensitivity determined to educate himself against all odds. To a certain extent, this is not so much an analysis of what he achieved – and achieve he did, formidably – as of how he was aborted, and why. In Fou Lei and his Alibis, we observe a man of letters turning time and again to art and literature as a refuge, and I raise, and leave open, questions about his conditions and reactions, still unresolved; questions of alienation and exile, imposed and chosen; questions of perceived roots, perceived universality; the question, as Simone Weil put it, of the relationship between destiny and the human soul.

Traditionally, Chinese regarded China as the centre of the world, displaying little interest in foreign lands. Before the 1840s, although there were records of a few brave pilgrims traveling to huge distances, Chinese travel literature was dominated by essays and diaries written about the natural scenery of China. In the late Qing, a period of transformation during which Chinese society was challenged by the West and later Japan, Chinese intellectuals, realizing China’s weakness, traveled to these countries in search of remedies for the state. The resulted burgeoning travel literature contains not only firsthand information of the West and Japan at the time, but also details about individual responses to the foreign lands they visited. Despite the relatively small amount of research done on these writings, they are, indeed, the most significant archival materials for the study of the early perceptions of the Chinese of the West in the modern period. Among these travelers, Wang Tao (1828-1897) is certainly worthy of discussion. Apart from being a reform pioneer, Wang Tao was also being pioneering to be the first intellectual to travel to Europe and Japan. His two travelogues, Manyou suilu and Fusang youji, however, have only been used as references in biographical research, neglecting the fact that they consist of not only unprecedented journeys of a Chinese intellectual, but also Wang’s constant evaluations of home politics, of which he carefully laid out in the form of travelogue. This dissertation aims to explore the two travelogues, and is particularly concerned of their relationship with the historic context, the author’s motives of writing and other foreign travel writings of the time. The two travelogues stand out both in subject maters and the subtle ways Wang (re)constructed Europe and Japan. They can be seen as a manifesto of Wang’s views on himself, China and the world. While many travelogues of the same period were written in a data or analysis-based style, Wang Tao embodied his observations abroad, his criticism and vision of the future China, his personalities, assumptions and expectations and the spirit of his time with a highly refined language in the two accounts, and had make them intriguing works of literature.

Le sujet principal de la thèse est la comparaison entre les voyages maritimes européens et chinois en littérature aux 15e et 16e siècle. Il s'agit des navigateurs et des voyageurs célèbres comme Christophe Colomb, Jean de Léry et Vasco de Gama ; et il s'agit tout de même de certains navigateurs méconnus en Europe, tels qu'André Thevet et un navigateur chinois nommé Zheng He. La recherche aboutit à rassembler un corpus européen et chinois sur la littérature maritime de l'époque des grandes navigations. Aussi bien Colomb face à l'« Amérique » que Zheng He dans les pays de l' « océan ouest » ont évolué dans un monde inconnu. Les populations, les usages et les objets qu'ils découvrent dans ce nouveau monde diffèrent de ceux qu'ils ont connus dans leur monde d'origine. Pour les premiers explorateurs du « Nouveau Monde », quel qu'il soit, quel impact mental avait la découverte ? Aux siècles des grandes navigations, les situations étaient très différentes en Europe et en Chine. Les cultures étaient éloignées, parfois étanches l'une à l'autre. La question est dès lors de savoir comment la pensée et la vision des uns et des autres s'accommodait de la figure de l'Autre. / The main subject of the paper is the comparison between the Chinese and European navigations of the 15th and 16th centuries in literature. The study is about some well-known travellers such as Christopher Columbus, Jean de Lery and Vasco da Gama ; it is also about some underknown travellers such as André Thevet and Zheng He, Chinese navigator of the 15th century. The research is built on various Chinese and European paper works in the theme of great navigations. Both Columbus facing the "America" and Zheng He travelling in the countries of the "Western sea" experienced an impact of the unkown world. The people, the customs and the objects that they found in the new world turned out to be very different from what they had in their old world. For the first explorers, whoever they might be, what was the biggest shock that the discovery brought? During the time of great navigations, China and Europe were in very different situations. Their cultures were far from each other, even in a vacuum. Therefore the question is to know how they adapted their visions and thoughts to the image of the other in the unknown world.