On and off the map of “the world republic of letters,” literary Beijing, from exotic configurations to multivalent self-portraits, has unfolded, historically and geopolitically, as an ancient capital of traditional China, a Republican city of new thoughts and everlasting memories, a fallen city under Japanese military control, a socialist capital of Maoist ideology, and a rejuvenated and cosmopolitan megacity in the post-Cold War era and the new millennium. This chapter situates Beijing writing in the intertwined contexts of Chinese literature and World Literature in terms of evidenced influences, implicit connections, and paralleled representations. The methods of imagining Beijing have formed in the multilayered city-texts by writers across different historical times, which entailed variegated genres, ideas and trends, places and spaces, emotions and materiality, and cultural chronotopes. Entangled with Beijing narratives created by authors across the globe, the city’s imageries in Chinese literature prompt intriguing dialogues, in both visible and invisible ways, with World Literature. Together, this tapestry of urban writing encodes and decodes Beijing as a real, imagined, mythical, metaphorical and semiotic city surviving barbarianism, exoticism, Orientalism, (mis)understanding, (over)interpretation, and (un)translatability.

Examining two of the most influential novels of late imperial China, Ransmeier’s essay finds enslaved people to be both omnipresent and unremarkable in this period. Both the high Qing era The Dream of the Red Chamber and the Late Ming The Plum and the Golden Vase are set in opulent households doomed to decline, in part by the emotional needs or sexual appetites of their fallible male protagonists. Consuming these narratives, readers become invested in their fate, and accept a world in which human trafficking, slavery, and sexual exploitation played a natural part of domestic life. While unfreely obtained labor was a characteristic feature of the households described in these epic novels and played a central role in attending to the creature comforts of elite masters and mistresses, and while the authors did not necessarily obscure the emotional struggles of individual enslaved people, neither text advocates for social change. The essay also shows how both Dream author Cao Xueqin and the anonymous author of Plum bind their protagonists to karmically determined ends, deploy enslaved people in service of their storytelling, and take advantage of the predominant hierarchical system of their time, creating worlds in which no one was truly free.

This chapter takes up a small part of the writings of a group of Muslim intellectuals from China who studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s and worked to think through the connections between China, Islam, the Arab world, and literatures in Chinese and Arabic. Through a close reading of Recollections of Childhood (Tongniande huiyi), Ma Junwu’s translation of the first volume of Taha Husayn’s The Days (al-Ayyām), we see how the Sino-Muslim Azharites provide a valuable historical example and theoretical resource for our own scholarly practice at a time when attempts to go beyond the boundaries of national literatures and languages default all too quickly to monolingual approaches.

Chapter 33 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in China and Japan, examining figures such as Lord Byron, Liang Qichao, Zhou Zuoren, Luo Luo, Xiaofei Tian, Ozeki Iwaji, Ueda Bin, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Shao Xunmei, Yoshiya Nobuko, and Takayama Chogyu.