Ricerc@Sapienza

In his “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (A tentative proposal for the reform of literature), Hu Shi set forth the necessity to reform both the gist and the form of literature. Thereafter, he recognised the close connection between the reform of literature and that of the Chinese language, advancing the proposals of “Jianshe de wenxue geming lun: guoyu de wenxue, wenxue de guoyu” (The theory of a constructive literary revolution: a literature in the national language, a national literary language).

The John Fryer Papers (FP) are a fundamental archival resource. In the introduction of the article, the author briefly summarises the history of the FP and of their cataloguing; then, in the first chapter, he draws a brief summary of how the FP have been employed in secondary literature. In the second chapter, an outlook of the most important contents of the FP is sketched and further research perspectives are highlighted, with a particular focus on the fields of missionary linguistics and of cultural interactions between the West and China.

The article analyzes the compilation of bilingual dictionaries, in particular Chinese-foreign language dictionaries, focusing in the second chapter on those created by Robert Morrison (Ma Lixun ???, 1782-1834) and Karl Ernst Georg Hemeling (He Meiling ???, 1878-1925). The third chapter then is centred on the description of Chinese language within the Chinese-foreign language dictionaries of the 19th century, as well as of the equivalence of concepts and words. The following two chapters are finally devoted to the works by Kuang Qizhao ??? (1836-after 1899?) and Yan Fu ?? (1854-1921).