The Modernity of Chinese Scholarship and Its Historical Situatedness——Taking the Example of Wang Guowei's Drama Studies

At the turn of the twentieth century Wang Guowei strove to engage in a dialogue with the world in new conditions of scholarly exchange, in an attempt to establish a “global scholarship,” while scholars outside China saw in Wang an “authentic” Chinese voice and source of intellectual authority. Wang Guowei's pioneering work in the field of drama studies, his History of Song and Yuan Drama, was a product of these disparate historical forces. Examining the production and historical situatedness of Wang Guowei's drama studies will shed light not only on mechanisms of the production of modern scholarship, but also on recurrent themes in modern Chinese scholarship such as the notion of a “modern historiography” and nationalism.