Abstract
This article examines Chinese literary scholar Zheng Zhenduo’s 1922 essay “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀) as a counter-narrative to both imperial isolationism and post-World War I nationalist fragmentation. Writing at the intersection of China’s May Fourth Movement and the global post-war crisis, Zheng developed a theory of world literature that challenged both Goethean Eurocentrism and the compartmentalization of comparative literary studies. Through systematic analysis of Zheng’s theoretical writings, editorial projects, and pioneering work on folk literature (suwenxue 俗文學), this article demonstrates that Zheng’s project of “the unification of literature” operated on three levels: dismantling the metaphorical Great Wall between Chinese and world literary canons through translation praxis; positioning folk literature as the cosmopolitan foundation of cultural vitality; and constructing vast archival compilations that resisted nationalist amnesia. Whereas Qin Shi Huang’s historical “burning of books and burying of scholars” sought to sever historical continuity and the Great Wall enforced spatial division, Zheng’s archival and editorial work proposed literature as a borderless republic of letters founded on shared human sentiment, offering an early twentieth-century model of literary cosmopolitanism that remains theoretically significant for scholars of world literature.
Alt Text Acknowledgement
1
Recommended Citation
Liang, Wenxin.
"Beyond the Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’s “Unification” of World Literature at the Juncture of China’s May Fourth and Post-World War I Era."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
27.3
(2025):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.5294>
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