In recent years, the legendary Hong Kong author Jin Yong has been referred to in Anglophone media as ‘China's Tolkien’, but the basis for that comparison has been disregarded by Sinologists for valid reasons. However, the very establishment of the comparison, even on questionable grounds, may be a stroke of serendipity. This essay probes the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from a literary perspective, arguing that the comparison is often made on the basis of fundamental misconceptions, but that it is nevertheless serendipitously apt for reasons that have remained unexplored. Identifying Jin Yong and Tolkien as influential modern literary medievalists, the essay shifts the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from the problematic terrain of genre to the firmer ground of medievalist antiquarianism, with important implications for questions of cultural identity, historical reconstruction and narrative form.

Isabel Burton, née Arundell, was a model cosmopolitan wife to her famous explorer husband Richard Francis Burton for thirty years. Yet, two pieces of twenty-first-century neo-Victorian Burton-biofiction – The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov and The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder – write her clean out of their core narratives. Having explored these conspicuous absences, my article turns to the historical Lady Burton's life writing, focussing on The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, in which she narrativizes the couple's transnational lives. Two of its stylistic devices are discussed in detail – paratexts and the peculiar use of first-person narration – in order to trace in them a double-gesture by which Isabel Burton combines self-erasure with self-empowerment. The detailed analysis of six paratexts, as theorized by Philippe Lejeune and Gérard Genette, supports the claim that Isabel, from the text's fringe, constructs for herself a role that combines elements of the scribe, editor/curator, narrator and author. Looping back to the neo-Victorian biofictional texts, I propose that, in Life, the historical Isabel Burton fuses self-erasure (which Troyanov picks up) with self-empowerment (which Hodder picks up), to forge a female writerly identity compatible with her self-fashioning as the wife/widow of a Victorian transnational cosmopolitan.

Carl Van Vechten's novel Peter Whiffle. His Life and Works (1922) is a work of ‘autobiografiction’, merging biography and autobiography, and drawing attention to the fictional elements of life writing. It problematizes authorship and posits selfhood as a dialogic, polyphonic construct, dependent on the strategies, content and structure of narrative. The article explores the complex intertextual presence of George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man in Van Vechten's novel: they both propose different aspects of a similar story of two friends with cosmopolitan and refined tastes, whose subjectivities are mediated by constant references to other literary characters, and who depend on one another's narratives to have access to their own selves, or at least to become authors of works of art about themselves. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's and Lucia Boldrini's studies on auto/biographical selves, and on Rebecca Walkowitz's and Homi Bhabha's theories of cosmopolitanism, the article argues that Peter Whiffle's emphasis on dialogic subjectivity questions the notion of authorship and creates a problematic, parodic form of cosmopolitanism. This type of cosmopolitanism does not contribute to any productive experiences of self-knowledge or of knowledge of the foreign ‘other’, but rather asks crucial questions on the very possibility of these experiences.

The publication, in 1908, of Hans Bethge's Die chinesische Flöte marked a highpoint in the reception of Chinese poetry in modern Europe. Bethge's ‘Nachdichtungen’ (‘after-poems’) of poems from the Tang dynasty through to the late 1800s were extraordinarily popular, and were almost immediately immortalized by Gustav Mahler's decision to use a selection from them as the text for Das Lied von der Erde (1909). Yet Bethge could not read Chinese, and so based his poems on existing translations by figures including Judith Gautier, whose Livre de Jade had appeared in 1867. This article situates Bethge's reception of Chinese poetry – and in particular, that of Li-Tai-Po (Li Bai) – within the context of European chinoiserie, notably by concentrating on his engagement with a recurring imagery of lyrics and Lieder. Although he was deaf to the music of Chinese, Bethge was extremely sensitive to the ways in which Li-Tai-Po's self-conscious reflections on poetic creation underlay his ‘after-poems’ or Nachdichtungen, deriving his impetus from images of the rebirth of prose – songs, birdsong, lyrics, Lieder – as poetry. The very form of the ‘lyric’ emerges as predicated on its function as echo: the call of the Chinese flute elicits the response of the European willow. That this is necessarily a comparative process – between Asia and Europe, between China, France, and Germany – suggests its resonance as an example of the West-Eastern lyric.

Despite its originality, Tennyson's poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) shares considerable characteristics with the pre-Islamic Arabic poems the Mu‘allaqāt, namely those composed by Imru’ al-Qays and ‘Antara. The similarities include length, rhyme, metre, genre, themes and appeal, which this article compares in order to show that Tennyson adapts these source text resources to the concerns and subject matter of his own poem, and not for the purpose of translating the Mu‘allaqāt. It follows that ‘Locksley Hall’ needs to be studied in modern scholarship not only as a poem that reflects some aspects of Tennyson's biography and poetic craft, but also as an imitation of other poetry. This article analyses the details that unveil the imitative strategy Tennyson adopts in ‘Locksley Hall’. In so doing, it posits that ‘imitation’ is better suited than ‘intertextuality’ as a conceptual tool for articulating the links between ‘Locksley Hall’ and the Mu‘allaqāt. Furthermore, in contrast to previous critical studies that refer to the influence on Tennyson of the Mu‘allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays, this article argues that Tennyson combines two Mu‘allaqāt as source materials for his own poem.