Comparative Literature Now: The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literature, Xiaofan Amy Li

Thursday 22 October 2026
16:00 - 18:00 

Seminar Room 10, St Anne's College

Xiaofan Amy Li (UCL), Margaret Hillenbrand (Oxford) 

Join us to celebrate Xiaofan Amy Li's new book, The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures! We will begin with an introduction from Amy about her book, including key questions about World Literature, followed by a discussion and Q&A with Margaret, and ending with a wine reception.

Focusing on how risk is produced and reshaped by literary aesthetics, Li argues that risk is a creative rather than negative force in world literature. Instead of disaster narratives, Li approaches risk from the fresh perspective of ludic aesthetics, or playful, gamelike, illusionistic and experimental literary strategies. Comparatively analysing an original selection of texts by modern and contemporary French-Francophone and East Asian writers, each chapter focuses on a particular genre such as the novel, life-writing, poetry, and image-texts.  Franco-East Asian literatures help us rethink risk in linguistically diverse and cross-cultural contexts, providing a new paradigm for comparative criticism and world literature.

Xiaofan Amy Li is Associate Professor in Comparative Cultural Studies at UCL. Her research spans literatures and comparisons between France, China, and East Asia broadly speaking. After she earned her PhD at Queens' College, Cambridge, she was a Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Literature & Translation at St Anne's College, Oxford and Programme Co-ordinator for OCCT during 2015-16. She is a member of the International Comparative Literature Association Research Committee on Literary Theory.

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focusses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, especially cultures of protest and secrecy. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), which was awarded the Modern Languages Association’s Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies in 2024. She has recently completed a new book about the cultural politics of the face in Chinese visual culture during the era of biometric surveillance, cosmetic surgery, and masked protest.