Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China

by Patricia Laurence

Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description.

Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's relationship into a study of parallel literary communities―Bloomsbury in England and the Crescent Moon group in China. Underscoring their reciprocal influences in the early part of the twentieth century, Laurence presents conversations among well-known British and Chinese writers, artists, and historians, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, G. L. Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, E. M. Forster, and Xiao Qian. In addition, Laurence's study includes rarely seen photographs of Julian Bell, Ling, and their associates as well as a reproduction of Ling's scroll commemorating moments in the exchange between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group.

While many critics agree that modernism is a movement that crosses national boundaries, literary studies rarely reflect such a view. In this volume Laurence links unpublished letters and documents, cultural artifacts, art, literature, and people in ways that provide illumination from a comparative cultural and aesthetic perspective. In so doing she addresses the geographical and critical imbalances―and thus the architecture of modernist, postcolonial, Bloomsbury, and Asian studies―by placing China in an aesthetic matrix of a developing international modernism.

Genres: Nonfiction, China, History

440 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Patricia Laurence is a writer, critic, and professor of English at the City University of New York. She has written widely on Virginia Woolf, transnational Modernism, Bloomsbury, contemporary novelists, modernist women writers, Republican era Chinese literature and biography.. She currently reviews for Review of Contemporary Fiction, and English Literature in Transition. Her publications include Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (University of South Carolina Press, 2003), translated into Chinese (Shanghai Bookstore Press), 2008; and The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford University Press, 1992). She is currently completing a biography of Elizabeth Bowen.

-- from her official website, http://www.patricialaurence.com/index...

Reviews

[Atir · Rating 3 out of 5]

+ : points about Modernism and transculturality, the "ownership" of modernism, some stylistic observations, the letters from Bloomsbury to the Chinese

- : the emphasis on collaboration is a bit too enthusiastic and overly simplistic, some naivety in the understanding of all things Chinese, you can't just go around calling one of the greatest (whether you like it or not) Chinese poet of modernity a young fella who decided he wanted to be an English gentleman when he grows up

[Chengru · Rating 5 out of 5]

an absolutely interesting cross-border-cross-genre-comparative/multi-dimensional study. the real version of "possession".