"The present volume is the product of a joint effort made by scholars from across China (including Hong Kong), Japan and Europe. The book gathers sixteen papers devoted to literary and cultural criticism from a comparative point of view.
A perspective prominent in this volume is imagology, an approach first developed by Daniel-Henry Pageaux, and which focuses on specific images in literary and other texts. The study of the image of the “foreign” in national literary traditions, for instance, belongs to the traditional purview of comparative literature. Pageaux did more than uphold this tradition. He practically reinvented it using new theoretical concepts and perspectives (in particular, semiotics and reception aesthetics). On this basis, he was able to develop a theory and a methodology that are both usable and in tune with contemporary concerns.
The present book covers a wide range of topics in the study of images of Westerners in Chinese and Japanese literature. Individual contributions deal with issues such as the genesis of the Chinese term Foreign Devil, the occurrence of Westerners in modern Chinese and Japanese literature, and the Chinese and Japanese reception of indiviual western authors and artists such as, amongst others, Oscar Wilde, Vincent Van Gogh, and Madame Roland. Some papers examine individual authors such as Lu Xun and Takeyama Michio. Others examine historical periods or literary movements. The approaches followed range from historical investigations of linguistic practices to detailed literary analyses."--Brill edition description.

Part One: Images of Westerners in Chinese Literature: Zhaorong Peng: The Image of the "Red-Haired Barbarian” in Chinese Official and Popular Discourse -- Hua Meng: The Chinese Genesis of the Term 'Foreign Devil" -- Jiaming Han: The Image of the West in A Dream of Red Mansions -- Xiaohong Xia: Madame Roland in China: The Reception and Reinterpretation of a Popular Literary Image -- Xiangyu Liu and Hailiang Ma: Byronism in Lu Xun -- Peng Luo: Young Westerners in the Writings of Chinese Scholars -- Xiaoyi Zhou: Oscar Wilde: An Image of Artistic Self-Fashioning in Modern China, 1909-1949 -- Rumin Wen: The Image of Westerners in the Gaze of Cultural Criticism -- Raoul David Findeisen: Non vi leggemmo avante Or Memory Transformed: the Shaping of Western Authors and their Partnerships as Models for a New Literature in China (1911-49) -- Hengda Yang and Peng Chen: Images of Westerners in the Chinese Novel since the 1980s.

Part Two: Images of Westerners in Japanese Literature: Kinya Tsuruta: Images of Westerners in Tanizaki Juni’chirō and Nakazato Tsuneko – Yuzo Ota: Christianity, Christian Missionaries, and the Image of Westerners in Modern Japanese Literature -- Naoki Inagaki: The Function of "Mediation" — Images of the French in Tales of France (Furansu Monogatari, 1909) of Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) -- Hitoshi Oshima: The Image of Westerners in Modern Japanese Literature -- Shigemi Inaga: The Myth of Vincent Van Gogh in Modern Japan and China -- Sukehiro Hirakawa: The Image of the Former British Enemies in Takeyama Michio's Harp of Burma (1948) -- Glossary to the text on Chinese literature –Contributors.