The Centre’s Advisory Board
Professor Barbara Benedict, Trinity College Hartford
Professor Gerard Carruthers, University of Glasgow
Professor Daniel Fulda, University of Halle-Wittenberg
Professor Scott Gordon, Lehigh University
Professor Fiona McIntosh, University of Lille
Professor Stana Nenadic, University of Edinburgh
Professor Jurgen Pieters, Ghent University
Professor James Raven, Cambridge University
Professor Lisa Walters, University of Western Australia
Founded in November 2020, the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture is based at the School of Foreign Studies and draws its membership from the School’s literature subject group. Its founding director is Sandro Jung, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, who also serves as general editor of the Lehigh University Press book series, Studies in Text and Print Culture, and as Editor-in-Chief of the A&HCI journal, ANQ, which is published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. The centre is the first of its kind in China and approaches textuality from a range of theoretical perspectives, including those that favour attention to the materiality of text, text technologies, performance practice, the history of the book, paratext, epitext, and textual phenomena that can meaningfully be mined as part of the reception history of literary works. It does not restrict its scholarly efforts to the study of verbal, typographically realised structures but comprehends text more broadly to include not only tropes, (verbal) images, and illustrations but also literary material culture and multi-medial hybrid textualities. Members are especially interested in the multifarious readability of literary texts, and utilise a range of theories to investigate textual meaning.
The Centre is international in outlook and welcomes research collaboration with both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars. It wishes to promote interdisciplinary understanding of textuality that is attentive to both matters of ideational, verbal content and the form and material execution this content takes. As such, it fosters research that studies intermediality, adaptation, and translation processes. Comparative literature approaches inform the research of a number of the Centre members’ research. And members are, furthermore, centrally interested in how the mediation of literature to different audiences operated over time. The Centre’s members engage with the wider scholarly community through publication, the running of seminar series that feature both national and international scholars, conference attendance, and the organisation of workshops and conferences.
The chronological range of research extends from Shakespeare to the present day, with particular strengths in the literature and culture of the “long” eighteenth century and the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Centre is home to a number of funded research projects, including a project on the material afterlife of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which studies illustrated editions and other artifacts that remediate this classic of English literature. A scholarly gathering on the novel and economics (understood in its various different meanings) will take place in 2021. Research on another eighteenth-century classic, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and its reception in China is on-going. Furthermore, work on eighteenth-century American almanacs and the agents of print involved in their making, as well as their cultural and literacy-enhancing function, is underway. Other research projects are imagological, such as an investigation of the concept of the “ocean” in modern Japanese Tanka, which studies "ocean" imagery in modern Japanese Tankas and investigates its cultural meanings. Yet other colleagues examine anthropological contexts, including race in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, as well as philosophical considerations in relation to David Foster Wallace’s The Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, focusing in their work on contemporary British and American novels, postmodern fiction, and theories of the novel. Apart from a project on Barbara Kingsolver’s communities that is supported by the National Social Sciences Fund, a project on federal theatre that applies a multidisciplinary perspective is funded by the Ministry of Education.
Recent activities include:
Sandro Jung’s plenary lecture, “Stothard’s Vignettes and the Mediation of The Faerie Queene,” International Online Symposium on Shakespeare, Milton, and European Literary Traditions, CMRS, Zhejiang University, 1 November 2020.
Weihong Zhu hosted the eighth session of “Salon of Japanese Literature for Shanghai Colleges and Universities” and invited Professor Chen Duoyou of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies to give a lecture on "Ruminate on Japanese Maritime Literature," 24 October 2020.
Recent Publications:
Sandro Jung, “Ephemeral Spenser: Stothard’s Vignette Series of The Faerie Queene for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas,” Eighteenth-Century Life 44:2(2020): 76-108. (A&HCI)
---. “Literary Ephemera: Understanding the Media of Literacy and Culture Formation,” Eighteenth-Century Life 44:2(2020): 1-16. (A&HCI)
---. “Reinterpretation through Extra-Illustration: A Copy of Thomson’s The Seasons at the Library Company of Philadelphia,” The Book Collector 68:2 (2020): 295-314. (A&HCI)
---. “The Role of Visual Culture in the Patriotic Editions of the Morisons of Perth: From ‘The Scottish Poets’ to The Poems of Ossian,” ANQ, 33:1 (2020): 37-47. (A&HCI)
---. “Book Illustration and the Transnational Mediation of Robinson Crusoe in 1720,” Philological Quarterly, 99:2 (2020): 171-201. (A&HCI)
---. “G. L. Crusius, Leipzig Artist and Engraver, and His Literary Illustrations in the 1750s,” Oxford German Studies, 49:3(2020): 209-227. (A&HCI)
Russell Palmer, Captives, Colonists and Craftspeople: Material Culture and Institutional Power in Malta, 1600–1900. New York: Berghahn, 2020. (Monograph)
---. “Post-Medieval Maltese Earthenware and its Makers: Unearthing a Forgotten Industry,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24 (2020): 422–455. (A&HCI)
Xianmin Shen, “Gender, Nature, and Spirituality in Prodigal Summer,” ANQ, 33:4 (2020): 306-314.
Wei Wang, “Propaganda or Art: On three Debates in the History of the African American Theatre,” Foreign Literature (2020).
Guojing Yang, “Aporetic Moment of Community: On the Collapse of the Democracy Here and Now and the Pig-Hunting Tribe in the Lord of the Flies,” Foreign Literatures, 3 (2020). (CSSCI).
---. “W. H. Auden’s Journey in China and Its Influence upon the Transformation of His Later Poetry,” Comparative Literature in China, 4 (2020): 116-139. (CSSCI).
Weihong Zhu, “A Comparative Study of the Difficulty of Translating Haiku”, BORDER CROSSINGS: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies, 9 (2019), 97-112.