The Great Convergence: Translation, A Chinese Colloquial Text, and British Romanticism

The University of Oregon Confucius Institute for Global China Studies presents Professor Patricia Seiber. This talk will examine how P.P. Thoms' (1790-1855) production of the Cantonese ballad "Huajian 花箋" engaged both with Cantonese localism on the one hand and British romanticism on the other.

Patricia Sieber
East Asian Languages and Literatures
Ohio State University

This talk examines the career of P.P. Thoms  (1790-1855), a professional printer who spent eleven years in Macao (1814-1825) in the employ of the British East India Company. During this period, he was paid to manage the production of Robert Morrison’s six-volume A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815-1823). In an unpaid capacity, Thoms produced the first bilingual edition of a Chinese colloquial text, the Cantonese ballad Huajian 花箋 (also known as the “The Eighth Book of Genius”) in 1824. The talk will examine how this text engaged both with Cantonese localism on the one hand and British romanticism on the other. In establishing a convergence between Chinese and English literature, Thoms constructed a translational paradigm that cannot be readily subsumed under postcolonial models of cultural encounter and hence calls for a rethinking of the history of Chinese Studies and Sino-British contact.

Patricia Sieber is interested in the canon formation, print culture, and cultural translation surrounding Chinese vernacular genres from the Yuan period onward in Chinese and overseas contexts. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 (Palgrave, 2003) and the editor of Red is not the Only Color (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). She is currently completing a book project entitled How to Wage Peace with a Dictionary: Artisan Identity, Radicalism, and Sino-British Relations, 1790-1855. Her essays have been published in or are forthcoming from Representations, Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, East Asian Society and Publishing, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Monumenta Serica among others. Having been awarded funding from major bodies such as the NEH, ACLS, DAAD and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, she has presented her research all over the US, Europe, and the Chinese-speaking world and has been interviewed about Chinese literature by The New York Times, the BBC Worldservice as well as by local media. She is the associate editor for East Asian Publishing and Society and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture and Contemporary Buddhism.

Presented by the UO Confucius Institute for Global China Studies, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies Jeremiah Lecture Fund, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Asian Studies Program.