ABSTRACT
In her widely acclaimed book Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak points out that in the U. S., “Area Studies were established to secure U. S. power in the Cold War. Comparative Literature was a result of European intellectuals fleeing ‘totalitarian’ regimes” (Spivak 2003: 3). The discipline of modern Chinese literature in the U. S. seems to have taken a third path. It emerged as a response to the Anglo-American literary practice of New Criticism predominant in U. S. academia in the 1940s and 1950s. It is commonly accepted that the field of modern Chinese literature in the U. S. was established after the 1961 publication of C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957. According to Hsia himself, as well as other scholars, his work was deeply influenced by his mentors William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, and J. C. Ransom, all outspoken practitioners of the New Criticism (Ji 2011: 30–43). Hsia’s graduate study in English literature at Yale University also introduced him to The Great Tradition written by British critic F. R. Leavis. Following Leavis’s example of establishing a canon for English fiction, Hsia set out to delineate a “great tradition” for modern Chinese fiction.
