Emily Sun, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 176 pp. US$33.00

Many readers and commentators more concerned with the formal and aesthetic aspects of literary study may then find it highly refreshing to turn to Emily Sun’s fascinating new study. Her monograph, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, is not really concerned with the historical cultural encounter, preferring, instead, to navigate its course by the intellectual constellations of comparative literature, in pursuit of the rather vexed debates about what we know of as “world literature” and China’s problematic presence in that field.