A revival of ci writing was witnessed in the Qing dynasty. Emerging with this resurgence was the founding of scores of ci societies. After the fall of the Qing, some loyalists and traditional literati, following the examples of their predecessors, joined together to form a number of ci societies in Republican China. For loyalist-lyricists such as Zhu Zumou, ci writing was not just one of the effective ways to convey their memories of the past. It also meant to be a gesture of practicing and preserving traditional Chinese culture. However, due to ideological bias, their works and the vitality of cishe did not receive sufficient attention from literary historians in the past. This paper attempts to reveal and examine the interesting features of cishe in the Republican era, asserting that within the collective voice of and harmonious correspondence among the traditional lyricists, there were always some dissonances occurred. First I delineate a general picture of ci societies in Republican China, explicating the geographical distribution and social networks of ci lyricists and why lyricists from the Qing loyalist faction can associate with members of the anti-Manchu Southern Society (Nanshe), and what this phenomenon means to us. Then I focus on the Foam Society (Oushe), the ci society formed in Shanghai before the Japanese occupation of the city, and its group ci composition. Besides recounting Oushe members’ backgrounds and the details of their “refined gatherings,” I will bring into light the multifaceted thematic and stylistic features displayed in the members’ works.

Dating back to at least the Han dynasty, calligraphy has been a powerful object of culture and a medium of elite education, document preparation, and character evaluation. Discourses surrounding rulers and calligraphy form an important sub‐strand in materials on calligraphy, and these accounts often depict calligraphy as a vehicle capable of reflecting a ruler’s moral character. This paper explores narratives that blame early Tang women power‐holders, in particular, the Taiping and Anle Princesses, for borrowing and subsequently losing precious calligraphic items that were considered the authentic work of Wang Xizhi. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the different narratives describe the physical movement or location of the Wang Xizhi pieces in relation to contemporary rule and factional politics. The narratives interpret the calligraphic manuscripts as an example of the cultural inheritance, to which the ruler should properly relate in particular ways. In this way, the fate of the Wang Xizhi artifacts is understood in terms of the complex relationship between imperial power and the court’s cultural legacy.

Although James Joyce and Lu Xun were both writing at a time when a new nation was being created out of former empire, little has been written about the extraordinary synchronicities of their early careers or their common mission. Both understood a new nation must first be created in the hearts and minds of its people. Coming from a medical background, each regarded their countrymen as sick in spirit, paralyzed by slavish dependencies. Joyce saw such servility as fostered by Ireland’s long colonization under the British Crown, a subservience seconded by the “tyranny” of the Roman Catholic Church. For Lu Xun, this spiritual paralysis manifested itself as a legacy of the Confucianism of the late Qing dynasty. Working from a medical model, both writers present a detailed, precise, and cold account of the speech of their characters to reveal the true nature of their disease-while allowing the reader to reach his own diagnosis. By means of this new kind of narrative, both James Joyce and Lu Xun sought to liberate the “soul” or “spirit” of their people, granting them a voice of their own which itself clarified to what extent they had been conscripted by the words of others.