On the Horizon of World Literature

On the Horizon of World Literature is an outstanding, original, and groundbreaking book. Sun shows how asynchronous and historically unrelated works can be brought together for mutual illumination. Sun’s comparisons take into consideration the historical significance of texts as responses to modernity and their very existence as products of historical forces that shape what we understand as modernity. The author’s ambition in treating texts as fields of interlocking developments marks the book’s originality.—Wai-Yee Li, Harvard UniversityEmily Sun’s pathbreaking book bridges early twentieth-century Chinese literature and early nineteenth-century British literature in an entirely original and convincing way. By building this remarkable, two-way literary dialogue–across cultures, periods, and continents–Sun reawakens the promise and the necessity of comparative literature, as a unique discipline with new stories still to tell.—Alex Woloch, Stanford UniversityOn the Horizon of World Literature offers an exciting methodological challenge to future work on world literature. Moving away from the big picture models popular in recent discourse on the topic, Sun’s development of a translingual approach to close reading favors the recounting of intimate narratives of literary history rather than the search for broad patterns.– “Modern Chinese Literature and Culture”

Emily Sun is Visiting Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College. She is author of Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (Fordham, 2010) and co-editor of The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham, 2007).