Author ｜
Leo Ou-fan Lee
Abstract ｜
The current research on the Chinese translated fiction in the late Qing period mostly relies on closed reading of individual texts, though there are a few studies that extend the circulation of texts across transcultural and transregional boundaries. However, if we consider popular fiction as a forest composed of many trees, i.e. sub-genres of fiction, this kind of research often has the drawback of “seeing the trees but not the forest.” By applying the literary theory of Franco Moretti, this paper explores a method of examining how the acts of translating Western fiction show a process of appropriating the prototypical themes and conventions of the targeted genres and “grafting” the Western branches (i.e. technical traits) onto homegrown “trees,” thereby producing new interlocking “leaves.” As a result, we can see both forests and trees in such a “transplantation” process in the transcultural movement of textual translation and circulation. This research first examines the phenomenon of the multiplicity of subgenres in late Qing fiction—with such new brands as novel of sentiment, novel of sensation, novel of melancholy, novel of distress and suffering, erotic novel, etc. that seem to overflow beyond the generic limits of traditional Chinese scholar-beauty romance. These works not only took on new themes, but also served as a reflection of the social changes and the needs of a new book market. Moreover, through the investigation of a favorite subgenre of the English domestic fiction, called “sensation novel,” this paper illustrates how Chinese translators and readers received and interpreted the values of family and marriage, as well as the message of female subjectivity as embedded in Victorian novels. It further suggests that, by adorning the translated texts with rhetorical elements of Chinese traditional fiction such as those commonly found in scholar-beauty stories, the foreign sensation novels were transformed and transfigured in the Chinese versions. Finally, this article proposes an outline for the future research of late Qing translation with an eye to drawing a more comprehensive picture of the “transcultural” tree of the romance novel.
keywords ｜
late Qing fiction, genre, methodology for translation studies, romance, melodrama