How did James Joyce’s Ulysses, originally banned in both the United Kingdom and the United States, become the world literary classic it is today? This article investigates how Ulysses navigated censorship across multiple nations, overcoming ideological constraints to achieve canonization and even inspiring writers in other linguistic traditions to safeguard literary autonomy. It begins by tracing the reasons for its banning in the UK and US during the 1920s and examines how Joyce, with the support of Sylvia Beach, published the first complete English edition through her Paris-based bookstore and publishing house, Shakespeare and Company.

The analysis then explores the pivotal role of Shakespeare and Company as a bookstore, publishing house, and library in enhancing the visibility of Ulysses within both the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. In the wake of World War I, disillusioned Anglo-American modernist writers—including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein—gathered at Shakespeare and Company. Their active engagement with and promotion of Ulysses secured its status as a cornerstone of modernist literature. Simultaneously, in the Francophone world, Beach’s partnership with Adrienne Monnier, the proprietor of La Maison des Amis des Livres, was equally crucial. Together with translator Auguste Morel, and under Joyce’s meticulous guidance, they produced a French edition of Ulysses in 1929, solidifying its reputation in French literary circles. Ulysses thus emerged not only as a seminal modernist work across Anglophone and Francophone cultures but also as a text that, through its acclaim in the Francophone world, regained prominence in the Anglophone sphere.

The final section of this article expands the discussion to Sinophone Taiwan, tracing how Joyce’s resistance to censorship during the interwar period in defense of literary autonomy inspired Taiwanese writers in their pursuit of literary modernism during the Cold War. Under martial law, Taiwan’s cultural production was deeply politicized, with literature frequently serving as a tool for anti-communist ideological narratives. Yet, in response to this restrictive environment, Joyce’s negotiation with censorship became a crucial reference point for Taiwanese writers, prompting them to embrace a seemingly depoliticized and highly aestheticized form of literary modernism as a means of preserving their vision of literariness. So profound was Joyce’s influence that, as this article demonstrates, many Taiwanese writers even sought to emulate him by relocating abroad—particularly to the United States—to pursue a path toward literary freedom.

Raising the questions of migration and translation together gives us an opportunity to respond to Talal Asad’s critique of cultural translation as involving “the privileged position of someone who does not, and can afford not to, engage in a genuine dialogue with those he or she once lived with and now writes about.” The massive migrations caused by the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 urged numerous East Asian writers to engage in intense dialogues with their past experiences across geographic, historical, and political distances. This paper examines from a comparative perspective works in this genre produced within a few years after the end of the war by some of the foremost figures of postwar Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese literatures: Yŏm Sangsŏp, Abe Kōbō, and Zhong Lihe. Critiquing the conventional nation-based approach, this study considers a dialogical narrative form shared across their works. This form enabled these writers to fathom the realities of a postwar world being made in such unpredictable ways that they defied an authorial, monological point of view based on an available historical consciousness. Through analyzing these narratives, this paper will consider the function of polyphony in cultural translation.

Born in Guilin, Guangxi Province in China in the year of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war and having grown up in the flames of civil war before evacuating to Taiwan with the Nationalist army and government, Pai Hsien-yung’s translative habitus as a diasporic Chinese writer living in the West and the humanist values in his works have gained him entry to the international book market and acclaim in the English-language literary sphere. Owing to this, his works have been rendered into English by many academics teaching in North American universities, such as Terence Russell, Steven Riep, Christopher Lupke, Bert Scruggs, Linshan Jiang and Howard Goldblatt. While in producing the English version of his most well-known collection of short stories, Taipei People, Pai himself also stepped into this crucial role as a translator with the second translator Patia Yasin and the editor George Kao contributing finishing touches. Unlike other Southern literary works, bound for the Northern book market, that have undergone the interpretations of foreign translators, the author himself was intimately involved in the process of trading Taipei People to the market for world literature in English-speaking countries.

By exploring differences between the original version and the English version of Pai Hsien-yung’s self-translated short story “Love’s Lone Flower,” this paper explains the cultural and political ideology latent in the second version of the work, exploring how the multicultural and multilingual identities of the Southern other in the original version have been “standardised” in the translated version in order to serve the English audience. In working towards the goal of empowering the minorities and Others of the Global South, this paper also investigates the issues that involved in the literary industry in order to call for a more de-colonised translation for the future’s generations.