关键词: 约翰·莱曼, 《新作品》系列期刊, 变异学, 编辑凝视, 战争中国

Abstract: The New Writing series, edited by the twentieth-century British publisher John Lehmann, served not only as an intersection of late modernism and left-wing literature but also as a crucial site where Chinese wartime literature entered the English-speaking world and participated in the construction of world anti-fascist discourse. From the perspective of variation theory in comparative literature, Lehmann’s introduction of Chinese texts was not a mere transposition but a complex cross-cultural editorial negotiation. Situated in the European context following the setbacks of the Spanish Civil War, Lehmann employed a left-wing internationalist editorial gaze. Through paratext rhetoric and specific translation strategies, he subjected the heterogeneous Chinese experience to creative variation. This process reconstructed Chinese narratives, originally grounded in national salvation, into an organic component of the world anti-fascist discourse. Although this cross-lingual misreading and rewriting obscured the complexity of indigenous Chinese politics to some extent, it successfully generated a discourse of a “resistance community” with global significance, providing a unique historical paradigm for Chinese literature’s intervention in the landscape of world literature.

Key words: John Lehmann, New Writing series, variation theory, editorial gaze, wartime China