ABSTRACT
Shen Congwen was one of the exemplary writers C. T. Hsia enthusiastically promoted in his 1961 book A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , based on his Anglo-American humanistic criteria. 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. Both Hua-ling Nieh and Jeffrey C. Kinkley admire C. T. Hsia tremendously, and one can easily detect Hsia’s influence in their work. The 1990s saw remarkable changes in the field of modern Chinese literary studies in the U. S. As David Wang points out, several trends transformed the landscape of the field. In 2009, HarperCollins published a translation of Shen Congwen’s Border Town by Jeffrey C. Kinkley. Worlding Shen Congwen also proposes a new way of imagining the study of modern Chinese literature in an age of accelerating globalization.
