American, 19th Century Literature

How could a writer who knew no foreign languages call himself a translator? How, too, did he become a major commercial success, churning out nearly two hundred “translations” over twenty years? With rich detail and lively prose, Lin Shu, Inc., crosses the fields of literary studies, intellectual history, and print culture, offering new ways to understand the stakes of translation in China and beyond. This book shows how Lin Shu (1852–1924) rose from obscurity to become China's leading translator of Western fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Well before Ezra Pound's and Bertolt Brecht's “inventions” of China revolutionized poetry and theater, Lin Shu and his assistants—who did, in fact, know languages like English and French—had already given many Chinese readers their first taste of fiction from the United States, France, and England. After passing through Lin Shu's “factory of writing,” classic novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Oliver Twist spoke with new meaning for audiences concerned with the tumultuous social and political change facing China. Leveraging his success as a translator of foreign books, Lin Shu quickly became an authority on “traditional” Chinese culture who upheld the classical language as a cornerstone of Chinese national identity. Eventually, younger intellectuals—who had grown up reading his translations—turned on Lin Shu and tarred him as a symbol of backward conservatism. Ultimately, Lin's defeat and downfall became just as significant as his rise to fame in defining the work of the intellectual in modern China.

This book combines history, biography, and close reading to produce radically new interpretations of two of the most important novels in American history. After an introductory chapter on the early nineteenth-century image of the Maori, the book demonstrates, in a series of interlinked chapters, that Magua in The Last of the Mohicans and Queequeg in Moby-Dick were modeled on Maori chiefs. In a sharp reversal of the conventional understanding of Magua, the book argues that Cooper means us to see him not as a villainous “bad Indian” but as a fiercely majestic and intelligent “gentleman.” Like the massacre led by Te Ara, the Maori chief on whom Magua was based, the massacre led by Magua is represented as an example of why aristocrats, white or non-white, should be exempted from humiliatingly vulgar punishments. In the chapter on Moby-Dick, the book argues that the story of Te Pehi Kupe, a Maori chief who boarded a ship and became intimate with its captain, inspired Melville to turn Queequeg, originally a prop in a comic, democratic, humanist anecdote, into an icon of epic republican idealism. Breaking with the usual conception of Queequeg as an embodiment of loving companionship, the book shows that what he stands for above all else is “mortal greatness”—a loftiness that is at least latent in every one of us—and the buoyancy of spirit that sustains it.