The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters (Asia-Pacific and Literature in English)

This book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges. It sheds a new light on “May Fourth” and on the Irish Renaissance by establishing that the Irish Literary Revival (1900-1922) provided an alternative decolonizing model of resistance for the Chinese Renaissance to that provided by the western imperial center. The book also argues that Chinese May Fourth intellectuals translated Irish Revivalist plays by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O’Casey and Synge and that Chinese peasants performed these plays throughout China during the 1920s and 1930s as a form of anti-imperial resistance. Yet this literary exchange was not simply going one way, since Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics. Therefore this was a reciprocal encounter based on the circulation ofAnti-colonial ideals and mutual transformation.

Simone O’ Malley-Sutton earned her PhD from University College, Cork, Ireland. She lived for six years in Beijing, China and speaks both Chinese and the Irish language. She was awarded the Murphy Irish Fellowship to attend Notre Dame University in Indiana, from 2016-2018. Her interests include Post-colonialism and Gender. In Fall 2017 she was the Teaching Assistant for the “Approaching Asia” module at the Liu Institute in Notre Dame University in Indiana.