Event Details

In 2020-2021, we explore the global significance of Ruskin’s legacy in our seminar series ‘Ruskin Beyond Britain’.

In early twentieth-century China, both radical and culturally conservative intellectuals were interested in John Ruskin’s work, available as selected translations published in China in the 1920s and early 1930s. While reformers such as Li Dazhao, a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, were drawn to Ruskin’s critique of capitalist ethics, men of letters including Gu Hongming and Liang Shiqiu drew intellectual and moral sustenance from Ruskin’s writings on art and beauty.

This talk traces the development of Ruskin’s reception and influence in China in light of changing attitudes towards nature and the art of living. Drawing on her own experience, Nan Zhang explores how Ruskin continues to help us negotiate a world of conflicts and isolation through ‘the cultivated and observant eye.’

Dr Nan Zhang is Associate Professor of English at Fudan University and Honorary Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. She received the 2020 Humanities Research Centre Fellowship at Australian National University and British Academy Seed Funding in 2019.She has published on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and is currently working on modernist writers’ engagement with various forms of civic virtue in a global context. Her most recent articles have appeared in Modernist Cultures, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Journal of East-West Thought. She is a co-founder of the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA).

Respondent: Professor Jianxin Zhou is a Visiting Researcher in the Confucius Institute at Lancaster University. He is a professor of South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, a Steering Committee Member of Guangdong Foreign Literature Society and Council Member of Chinese Association for Suzhi Education. As a researcher, he has published 8 books and more than 100 academic papers. His research interests include Translation Studies, Anglo-American Poetry, Comparison and Translation of English and Chinese Poetry, and Pedagogy. As a poet and writer, he has published 4 collections of poems, and many short stories, novellas and essays.

This event is part of the 2020-2021 Ruskin Seminar Series, 'Ruskin Beyond Britain'. The series will place Ruskin’s legacy in a global context, featuring presentations from an international community of researchers who are exploring how Ruskin’s ideas have affected societies from Russia to Brazil, from America to Italy, and from France to China. Each seminar will include a presentation and response, followed by questions and discussion with participants. The Ruskin Seminar Series is free, online and open to all. If you would like to join the seminar reading group, email the-ruskin@lancaster.ac.uk.