Revisiting Pascale Casanova’s world literary space

Abstract

The claim that Pascale Casanova focuses too much on case studies from the West when articulating her model of a world literary space is well known in studies of world literature. Yet there remains no concrete examination of how the paradigms of her world literary space fail to fully account for the processes of transnational literary reception for Chinese writers who engage with literary works that are asynchronous with their own. This article is the first to use a comparative approach to reappraise the foundations of Casanova’s world literary space–temporalities, translation, and structural inequalities–by reading them alongside the works of the twentieth-century Chinese writer Yu Dafu. The ways in which Yu engages with European and Asian literature in his writings suggest a complex literary engagement for early twentieth-century Chinese writers. There is a need to re-evaluate the mechanisms underlying Casanova’s influential model of a world literary space in order to apprehend and open new lines of inquiries into other cosmopolitan encounters for twentieth-century Chinese writers.