Works of Lin Yutang

This book examines the relationship between translation and recognition as conceived by the most celebrated twentieth-century Anglophone Chinese writer and translator Lin Yutang (1895-1976). This book interrogates Lin’s identity as a significant yet largely unacknowledged forerunner of a politics of recognition through an examination of his translational and cultural engagements in the realms of literature, philosophy and war. A case study on the normally overlooked Lin’s translation engagement in the Second World War draws on extensive archival primary writings from The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Asia, etc.. This book repositions Lin as a major thinker, and a visionary theorist and practitioner of translation in his time. This book is not confined to the study of a single author/translator, in that it situates its reading of Lin’s texts and cultural engagements both through the prism of twentieth-century historical, philosophical and cultural debates surrounding identity, ethics, diaspora and geopolitics, and also in dialogue with the work of contemporary Translation Studies scholars and thinkers – including Antoine Berman, Charles Taylor, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lawrence Venuti.