During his lifetime Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was
among the most widely read German-language writers in the world.
Always controversial, he fell into critical disfavor as writers and
critics in a devastated postwar Europe attacked the poor literary
quality of his works and excoriated his apolitical fiction as naive
Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, Zweig's works
have enjoyed continued admiration and popularity, even canonical
status. China's Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success of
Zweig's novellas in China, where he has been read in an entirely
different way. During the New Culture Movement of the 1920s,
Zweig's novellas were discovered by intellectuals turning against
Confucian tradition. In the 1930s, left-wing scholars criticized
Zweig as a decadent bourgeois writer, yet after the communist
victory in 1949 he was re-introduced as a political writer whose
detailed psychological descriptions exposed a brutal and
hypocritical bourgeois capitalist society. In the 1980s, after the
Cultural Revolution, Zweig's works triggered a large-scale "Stefan
Zweig fever," where Zweig-style female figures, the gentle, loving,
and self-sacrificing women who populate his novels, became the
feminine ideal. Zweig's seemingly anachronistic poetics of
femininity allowed feminists to criticize Maoist gender politics by
praising Zweig as "the anatomist of the female heart." As Arnhilt
Hoefle makes clear, Zweig's works have never been passively
received. Intermediaries have actively selected, interpreted, and
translated his works for very different purposes.China's Stefan
Zweig not only re-conceptualizes our understanding of
cross-cultural reception and its underlying dynamics, but proposes
a serious re-evaluation of one of the most successful yet
misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century. Zweig's
works, which have inspired recent film adaptations such as Xu
Jinglei's Letter from an Unknown Woman (2005) and Wes Anderson's
Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), are only beginning to be rediscovered
in Europe and North America, but the heated debate about his
literary merit continues. This book, with its wealth of hitherto
unexplored Chinese-language sources, sheds light on the Stefan
Zweig conundrum through the lens of his Chinese reception to reveal
surprising, and long overlooked, literary dimensions of his works.
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