As a signature of socialist literature and art, the signification of the cross-cultural dissemination and reception of The White-haired Girl went beyond the work itself and affected the overall impression of socialist literature and art, and even socialism, overseas. Although reviews in English-speaking world basically recognized The White-haired Girl as a masterpiece, the cognition and acceptance of Western audience were not completely consistent with that of Chinese audiences.

This article extracts and analyzes the differences between the reviews of The White-haired Girl in the English-speaking world and the opinions of the Chinese academic circle to discern the nuances in the evolution of its meaning during its cross-cultural dissemination. When The White-haired Girl crossed culturally boundaries, the audience’s view also became spatialized. The space of current events, cultural space and meaning space endowed the cross-boundary forms different “spatialized” meanings.

During the War of Liberation, western audience viewed the work within the space of current events, understanding the current situation through the theatrical events. The spatialized viewing of the work contained at least four perspectives: viewing the performance, viewing the audience, viewing the environment and viewing themselves.

After the war, the connection between the content of the work and current events loosened, and more criticism focused on the artistic forms that provided a “sense of astonishment”. The cultural space had surpassed the space of current events to become the main factor influencing the generation of meaning. Interpreters were keen to pursue the regional significance of special forms. This was especially reflected in the comments on the new opera and the ballet, the two most innovative artistic forms of The White-haired Girl.

Compared with the rapid changing space of current events and infinitely diverse cultural space, the meaning space had a certain stability and a more profound influence on the vertical axis of time and the horizontal axis of space. Among the discourse combination of women’s emancipation, resistance against foreign aggression and class struggle in The White-haired Girl’s, the international dissemination strength of these three discourses was decreasing. The most universal discourse was women’s emancipation. “The White-haired Girl”, as an official woman imaging project in revolutionary China, became an international icon of “emancipated woman”.

When The White-haired Girl crossed cultural boundaries, it underwent a process of deterritorialization from the Chinese context and then a process of reterritorialization in the global political-cultural context. Yan’an literature and art represented by The White-haired Girl brought Western audience an impression of the forms’ “astonishment” and the content’s “shock”, transforming the Western impression of a “barbaric China” to that of a “civilized China”.

The attention to Chinese literary history in the Francophone world began in the early 20th century, when French interest in Chinese classics started to move beyond the traditional missionary Sinology perspective and ventured into the study of classical Chinese literature. Over the course of a century, major works of literary history such as G. Marguliés's two volumes of Histoire de la littérature chinoise (prose et poésie), Jacques Pimpaneau's Chine, histoire de la littérature, and ZHANG Yinde's Histoire de la littérature chinoise represent the Francophone world's comprehensive understanding of Chinese literature.

Additionally, some works focus on specific periods of Chinese literary history, such as André Lévy's la littérature chinoise ancienne et classique and la littérature chinoise moderne, and Basile Alexeiev's la littérature chinoise. These writings reflect the individual research and perspectives of French scholars on Chinese literature. All these diverse accounts of Chinese literary history are shaped by their respective historical contexts and exhibit inherent editorial frameworks.

This article aims to closely examine these accounts of Chinese literary history, uncover their underlying editorial logic, and compare them with the writing of literary history within China. By doing so, it seeks to critically reflect on the Francophone historiography of Chinese literature, fostering interaction and mutual learning between domestic and international approaches to literary history, and contributing to the construction of a scholarly system for Chinese literary history.

There has been a mass influx of traditional Chinese paintings and calligraphy into the hands of Western collectors since the 19th century. Museums， galleries and private collectors in the West have， over the centuries， built up notable collections of these works; they attracted broad interests from Western scholars， who studied in detail how such works were being collected， circulated， appreciated and appraised， forming an academic tradition in parallel with those of the Sinitic world. These studies from Western scholars， however， have yet to receive sufficient attention from their Chinese counterparts. This dissertation is thus an attempt to provide a reference on this subject for the very first time in Chinese academia， offering a systematic overview of Anglophone studies of Chinese paintings and calligraphy and examining them in specific historical contexts. It is the hope of the author that this work will motivates further research interests in the field and see more collaborative efforts between Chinese and Western scholars.

Tian is an Chinese influential perspective, carrying multiple meanings. Tian in The Analects as an important concept inherited from ancient times, has had a profound impact on Confucian thought regarding fate and the origin of the world. In translating tian in The Analects into English, translators have focused on different aspects of tian, emphasizing specific dimensions, thus resulting in a rich yet elusive translation. These interpretations can be classified into the following three dimensions:

The examination of Confucianism from a religious perspective has long intrigued Western scholars, particularly in the early stages of East-West interaction. Missionaries influenced by their understanding of religious beliefs, interpreted the transcendent concept of tian through a religious lens, focusing either on its religious or non-religious aspects. These interpretations were shaped by a faith-centered approach. Missionaries were not only introduced the concept of tian to the West but also subtly altered its understanding by associating it with the notions of Heaven&God.

The translators have also focused on presenting tian as a material dimension of the natural. This approach emphasizes tian as the sky and the natural foundation, bypassing its otherworldly connotations and instead highlighting tian as fate or natural law. But this approach did not challenge the mainstream understanding of tian as Heaven.

Since the 20C, Translators have become more focused on analyzing and restoring the meanings of East Asian classics, leading to an unprecedented dual tendency in translating complex concepts: complexification and simplification. On the one hand, translators have critically reflected on the previous reductionist interpretations of tian, recognizing that tian cannot be easily defined in simple terms, as it encompasses a broad range of meanings. As a result, translators, after analyzing the complex semantic field of tian, have chosen the simplest approach: transliterating tian to present the concept in its irreplaceable form. Whether through analyzing the implied meanings of tian or simplifying its translation, this dimension emphasizes a return to the classical text in its alienated context.

Historically, the different dimensions of tian in The Analects are not mutually exclusive but have instead been integrated. Each dimension reflects a distinct historical background that deeply influences the translator’s motivations and process. The varying purposes and methods of East&West civilizational exchange throughout history have focused on different attributes of tian, sometimes even contradictory ones. The translation of tian thus illustrates the difficult transformation of East Asian classics from the Heavenly Kingdom to the Way of Humanity from a Western perspective, while also prompting reflection on the interpretation of these texts from an East Asian viewpoint.

The sonnet has been popular in the world literature for hundreds of years and continues to add artistic vitality to contemporary lyric poetry. The sonnet, a classic poetic form that has gradually become “globalized” since its birth, has benefited from “worldwide” literary exchanges and is the result of mutual learning of civilizations. The process of generation and dissemination in the context of multi-civilization exchange and interaction has established the sonnet’s identity as world literature, and also endowed the sonnet with miraculous and highly flexible literary vitality, making it a “classic” poetic form that transcends time and space. Starting from the three dimensions of the multi-source generation of the sonnet, the global dissemination of the sonnet, and the re-examination of the history and theory of the sonnet from the world literature view of variation theory, this study attempts to reveal the previously ignored phenomenon of mutual learning of civilizations in the generation and dissemination of the sonnet, and reshape the perspective of our cognition of the sonnet.