LIANG SHIH-CH'IU

born Dec. 8, 1902, Peking, China died Nov. 3, 1987, Taipei, Taiwan writer, translator, and literary critic known for his devastating critique of romantic modern Chinese literature and for his insistence on the aesthetic, rather than the propagandistic, purpose of literary expression. After completing his preparatory education in China, Liang Shih-ch'iu graduated from Colorado College (in Colorado Springs, Colo., U.S.) in 1924 and went on to Columbia and Harvard universities for graduate study. At Harvard, where he was greatly influenced by the conservative literary critic Irving Babbitt, he wrote a paper outlining the romantic excesses of modern Chinese literature and suggested the development of a new Chinese literature that would borrow from the forms of Western literature. He later expanded these ideas into a book, Lang-man-ti ku-tien-ti (1927; The Romantic and the Classic), which was published in China. At the time of his return to China in 1926, Liang Shih-ch'iu also insisted upon the aesthetic and independent purposes of literary creation. He and others, including Hu Shih and Hs Chih-mo, founded the Crescent Moon Society in 1927 and published their ideas in the journal Hsin-yueh (Crescent Moon). Liang Shih-ch'iu taught English literature at Peking University (193437) and worked on his translation into vernacular Chinese of the complete works of Shakespeare (completed 1967). When the Communists took control of China in 1949, he moved to Taiwan. Besides his many critical works on Chinese and Western literature, Liang Shih-ch'iu was an able translator who made available to Chinese readers such varied works as the 12th-century love letters of the monk Abelard to Hlose, Sir James Barrie's Peter Pan, and Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights. He also wrote a history of English literature in Chinese and compiled a Chinese-English dictionary.