Secondhand China

“Combining nonexistent authors, taboo topics, imaginary journeys, Borgesian paradoxes, Bakhtinian phantom dialogues, dime novels, and journalistic forgeries, this account of reflections on an empire in crisis from another empire in crisis has nothing shopworn about it. Carles Prado-Fonts’s ingenious book twists the ‘East-West’ topic formidably out of shape.” —Haun Saussy, author of Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out

“A valuable contribution to several fields, Secondhand China will be consulted for many years to come. Its nuanced readings of Spanish- and Catalan-language materials reveal significant but often overlooked transnational dimensions of those literatures, but also bring new insight and ideas to broader debates about translation studies, Orientalism, and world literature.” —Christopher Bush, author of Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media

“Secondhand China tells the fascinating story of how Spain, a minor European country and thus part of the ‘rest of the West,’ wrote about China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through this new lens, Prado-Fonts proposes a more capacious scope for the working of translation and more complex scenarios for mapping intercultural connections. This is a welcome challenge to key concepts in the fields of comparative literature, European studies, translation studies, and beyond.” —Andrea Bachner, author of Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture

“Secondhand China is a remarkably original examination of how originality itself is created out of second-handedness, and specifically the way that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish and Catalan authors perceived (and celebrated) their own mediated relationship to China. Part literary analysis, part intellectual history, and part translation theory, Secondhand China offers an exciting new model for doing cross-cultural studies.” —Carlos Rojas, author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China