This book examines West Wind Monthly, a translation-oriented magazine published in Shanghai during the “Isolated Island” period (1937–1941), to show how translation helped remake emotional life in wartime China. Drawing on periodical studies, translation history, and the history of emotions, it moves beyond familiar accounts of wartime translation as political mobilisation, literary importation, or knowledge transfer. It asks how translated magazine writing entered everyday life, addressed ordinary readers, and created new ways of speaking about the self, family, love, marriage, sexuality, and private experience.

Focusing on editors, translators, readers, columns, essay contests, and reader correspondence, the book argues that West Wind Monthly did not merely introduce Western texts. It provided a public medium through which private feeling could be recognised, expressed, disciplined, and reorganised. By situating the magazine within Shanghai’s wartime public sphere and periodical ecology, this study offers a microhistorical account of how translation participated in the formation of modern subjectivity and emotional norms in Republican China.

Chenfei Hu is Lecturer in Translation Studies at Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies and has served as a visiting scholar at Fu Jen Catholic University. She is a member of the Translation History Committee of the China Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese. Her research focuses on Chinese translation history, periodical studies, and the history of emotions. She has led a project funded by the National Social Science Fund of China and has published on translation history and wartime periodical culture.