ABSTRACT
As my Introduction signalled, the French-language texts explored in this study are facets of a far larger, and much more diverse, network of French discourses on China, the Chinese, and sino-Western intercultural engagement. In the particular, cross-twentieth-century narrative artefacts scrutinized here, sino-French (and sino-European) contact is a primary, sustained object of attention, and is accorded a broadly consistent shape. The various narratives, literary and visual, anatomized in this discussion speak resonantly of sino-French, or sino-European, cross-cultural conjunctions, in relation to which aspects of embodied life (including sensory and psychological dimensions allied to it) are highly pertinent. And they cast those conjunctions as troubled, because rendered provisional, impossible, or interrupted chiefly but not uniquely by the impact exerted on them by the China(s) of the twentieth century.
