Wang, Chen2021-10-132021-10-132019-08https://hdl.handle.net/11299/224986University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2019. Major: Asian Literature, Culture & Media. Advisors: Joseph Allen, Shaden Tageldin. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 227 pages.This dissertation investigates the literary practice of bi-/multilingual Chinese writers within Sino-Anglophone contexts at different historical stages during the twentieth century. It proposes that writing in languages of the Other is a crucial part in the pursuit of modernity in (post)semi-colonial China. Through languages of the Other, Chinese authors’ representation and identification of Chineseness are put into dialogues, negotiations, and, at times, conflicts with heterolingual readerships of more diversified cultural, historical, and ideological backgrounds. Chinese modernity, I argue, is accomplished and continues to develop not on a monolingual and national level, but as part of a multilingual and global process. In a broader sense, this dissertation engages with questions in the fields of translation studies, bilingualism, transnationalism, and Asian American studies. Through the lens of the literary practice of bi-/multilingual Chinese writers, this study reconsiders such concepts as diasporic literature, literature of the exile, national literature, translingual practice, and above all, world literature. Chapter One examines the works of cosmopolitan liberal Chinese intellectuals in a Chinese-sponsored English-language journal, The China Critic. I display how the English language is creolized culturally and ideologically by Chinese authors in order to present their understanding of China-related issues to a non-Chinese audience in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter Two analyzes Lin Yutang’s English-language texts of the 1930s and 1940s as well as his correspondence with his American editor and publisher. I show how the idea of world literature is negotiated and contested in Lin’s non-Chinese literary practice. Chapter Three investigates Eileen Chang’s English-language rewriting of her Chinese texts in the early 1950s. I examine the ways in which the theme of displacement is demonstrated through the practice of translingual rewriting itself as well as in Chang’s narratives. Chapter Four studies U.S.-based author Hualing Nieh’s experiments with the Chinese language as a language of the Other in a translingual context and the hetero-cultural reception of her novel Sangqing yu Taohong/Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China. The Chinese language as well as the Chineseness embedded in it, I argue, are destabilized in Nieh’s writing and the cross-cultural adventures her work undertakes.enChinese modernityEileen Changheterolingual communicationHualing NiehLin Yutangliterary bilingualismThesis or Dissertation