Translation, popular imagination and the novelistic reconfiguration of literary discourse, China: 1890s--1920s

Translated literary texts constitute a large body of literary output in the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th; yet, this practice of translation has often been treated as imitations of Western literary thoughts. Striving to explore a Chinese-centered approach to study translation, this dissertation argues that translation of foreign novels at this time primarily functions as a mode for the Chinese intellectuals and populace to interpret and reconfigure the many historical crises and social transformations they were living through so as to imagine a new cultural and literary discourse. In this light, this study demonstrates, on the one hand, that translation, specifically, translation of sentimental and detective stories/novels, was intriguingly tied to the dramatically changing social environment, such as traumatic national crises, rapid urbanization, expansion of modern print culture and the emergence of a new literary market. It demonstrates, on the other hand, how translation transfigures the translator's individual, as well as collective, desires about history, race, social reality and cultural identity via doubly translating both Chinese traditional values and Western ideologies, literary properties, character typologies, and linguistic inventions.; A complicated process of reconfiguration, translation provides a site on which Chinese cultural and literary frontiers were hotly contested, negotiated, and remapped. Furthermore, translation not only produces textual relationships between Chinese language/texts and foreign languages/texts, but is also essential for reshaping the modern Chinese literary fields through technical apparatuses that guide, formulize and materialize the act of translation and through social agents who participate, organize and contest the practice of translation. This study concludes that what translations produce are not plausibly transparent textual relationships between the original and target languages and cultures, but new textual and social relationships with surplus meanings that avow the literary preferences, aesthetic inclinations, and, socio-historical desires of Chinese translators and their readers, primarily originating from their local environment. In this way, this study demonstrates an alternative way of reexamining cross-cultural interpretations and offers a new form of cultural mediation between the East and the West.