The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers of Modernism and Fighters against the Colonial Condition

This talk illuminates how the Irish Literary Revival provided an alternative route to the modern for the Chinese May Fourth writers, bypassing discourses on race that saturated literatures produced in the imperial centre. As writers of Modernism and as fighters against the postcolonial condition, both literary movements discovered a form of Modernism in a postcolonised peripheral setting, or a reciprocal type of Postcolonial Modernism as an alternative answer to the twin evils of Colonial Modernity and Capitalist Modernity. Research in original Chinese language sources makes clear how the Irish Revivalists influenced the Chinese May Fourth writers as anti-colonial writers and fighters, and how this process was reciprocal as Asian influences circled back to influence Irish Revivalism. Furthermore, questions of class, socialism and gender complicate this comparison of two contemporaneous early twentieth-century modern literature movements as the Irish and Chinese Renaissance movements shape our global heritage through mutual encounter and reciprocal exchange. Dr. Simone O’Malley Sutton, after living for six years in Beijing, lectured on modern Chinese history, gender and ethnicity at the University College Cork. She was awarded the Murphy Irish Fellowship in order to attend University of Notre Dame, from 2016 to 2018. Her interests include postcolonialism and gender. Her book entitled The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters was recently published by Palgrave MacMillan. She is a fluent speaker of both Chinese and Irish.