Translation and Interpreting Studies 11:2 (2016), 268–286. doi 10.1075/tis.11.2.07loc issn 1932–2798 / e-issn 1876–2700 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Translation ideologies of American literature in China Joe Lockard and Qin Dan Chinese translations of U.S. literature manifest a shit from the third-world inter- nationalism and anti-Western and anti-capitalist politics of the 1950s toward a diminished rhetorical antagonism in the late twentieth and early twenty-irst centuries. Because translation introductions are instrumental in introducing Chinese readers to the social context of U.S. literature, we surveyed a broad sam- ple of prefaces. Based on this survey, we theorize China-U.S. translation relations within a world system; examine the ideological character of post-Revolution translation introductions to American literature; and identify shiting ideological tides following the Cultural Revolution. Keywords: Chinese literature, American literature, transnationalism, paratexts, Sino-American relations, literary exchange China-U.S. translation relations and world systems Franco Moretti and those he has inluenced have advanced some of the sharpest critiques of contemporary literary studies. he assertion that twenty-irst century literary criticism remains mired in the techniques of the nineteenth-century, ac- cording to which individual texts function as the subject of analysis, lies at the center of much of Moretti’s work. Moretti advocates studying texts en masse in order to comprehend how literature functions within a world system. He empha- sizes the value of materialist analysis in order to discern trends that have arisen in Western literature and its spread, particularly in terms of genre. Lydia Liu and Priya Joshi are among the few who have applied similar approaches to the integra- tion of Asian literatures into a world system. Liu’s work (1995) adopts a complex approach, integrating translingualism, sociolinguistics, and comparative literature in order to study concepts of “modernism” in early twentieth-century Chinese lit- erature. More inluenced by Moretti’s material culture studies, Joshi (2002: 3–138)