Bloomsbury Heritage Series, London: Cecil Woolf Publishers, 2006.
Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf, embodied the contradictions of his generation in 1930s England. During his short life, he was variously labeled a poet, teacher, libertine, pacifist, military strategist, activist and soldier. His identity, difficult in formation, was overshadowed by the talented and, sometimes, authoritarian circle of Bloomsbury. In 1935, he had urged the young men of his generation to resist war even if accused of being “unpatriotic”; in 1937, under the political force of Fascism, he and his generation found that their “peace mind” had grown into a “war mind.” He enlisted as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil war where he died at the age of twenty-nine, “a violent finish in hot blood.”
Bloomsbury Heritage Series. London: Cecil Woolf Publishers, 1995, 1-22.
Read an excerpt:
Virginia Woolf stands upon a bridge that connects not only the private and public worlds of women, but also the developing aesthetics of writers of different countries. This expansive view of Woolf as influencing international modernist developments is not popular in some circles today as Bloomsbury-bashing critics charge that the principle upon which modernism fashioned itself was exclusion and snobbery about intellectual and cultural differences (John Carey). But it is time to shift the critical terms and locate Woolf outside this narrow ideological scope declaring her a modernist with an open–not a closed–poetics. In reading her diary, letters, essays and novels, we find that Woolf crosses cultural and class boundaries with her insistence upon the importance of the “gift of self” in women’s friendship (See Caws, Hawkes, Trautmann), and the importance of where the accent falls in the poetic language and literary expressions of foreign authors. Realizing that modernism is an international movement, she was drawn to the variety of ways in which the legendary Mrs. Brown might be described depending upon the age, country and temperament of the writer. Therefore, Woolf makes up “the foreign” and “woman” in her writings: “made up as one makes up the better part of life” (Mrs. Dalloway). In announcing this stance, Woolf casts off outworn cultural and aesthetic molds.
The East, then, is both a place and a metaphor that she invents, and as Haun Saussy suggests, “China has always been and still is in the process of being invented.”
Long Wind, General Editor, Introduction: this issue was the outcome of the Sino-American Educational Exchange between the faculty of the City University of New York and faculty from universities in Taiyuan, China, fall 2005.
The time will come when we mount the long wind, break the turbulent waves
Hoist our sails straight into the clouds, and cross the deep, deep sea. (Li Bai)
Excerpt from Introduction, “Humanities: History, Literature and Modernity in American and Chinese Thinking and Textbooks”
Leo Ou-Fan Lee has written of the importance of textbooks in modern China in his recent work Shanghai Modern. Upon the founding of the Republic, new textbooks embodying emergent ideas of modernity were written and promoted to clear the “beclouded” minds of students and to cultivate “enlightenment.” This process continues today as educators, administrators, publishers and the government of China shape the content of textbooks to reflect ideas emerging now in history, literature, science, and technology in a more globally-engaged China.
In America, similar re-considerations of the content of secondary school and college anthologies and textbooks were promoted in American high schools an colleges in the late 1980s. The question of “the canon” was raised: what list of representative writes and works should be taught in literature and history courses? And who chooses what students read and why? Teachers and scholars still debate whether there is a list of representative works that could be considered “universal” and “transcendent” of different cultures or whether the canon is always “relative” and shaped by contemporary social, cultural, and religious communities or current political movements and moods…..The debate continues and affects our teaching practices as there is a close relationship between widely-used anthologies or textbooks and teaching practices and curriculum development in history and literature. We begin our inaugural edition of Long Wind: History, Literature and Modernity in China and America with a discussion of these issues.
Read more
