The Foggy Cloud

The transmission of British comedies of manners in modern China from 1919 to 1949 includes different aspects like translation, studies, adaptation and influence. The translation of British comedies of manners in China mainly focuses on the dramas of Oscar Wilde and James Matthew Barrie. The continuous re-translation of these two writers'works gives expression not only to the exquisite translating style of drama translation in then China but also to the unpredictable and ever-changing historical ethos at that time. The Chinese studies of British comedies of manners involve two research paradigms:the case studies mainly centered on representative playwrights or the literary history commentaries canonizing those representative playwrights as well as introducing other less important writers and works. The striking contrast between the half-baked study achievements and the exquisite translating works is the product of then social and cultural ethos which extolled writing and depreciated theory. While for the adaptation of Chinese writers to the British comedies of manners, we can see it both as an effective way in imitating and creating the same kind of comedies at its early stage in China, and as a writing strategy of the dramatists to successfully avoid the censorship of pro-Japanese puppet regime and at the same time to manifest national consciousness. Hong Shen's Shaonainai De Shanzi, though based on Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, with the recreation of the play's theme, stage property and naming of the characters in the play, advocates Chinese traditional literary function of exhortation and guidance, the culture of jade and tea and the naming art. Huang Zuolin's Huangdao Yingxiong, though derived from James Matthew Barrie's The Admirable Crichton, further injecting the Chinese War of Resistance Against Japan into the play, thus changes the fate of the admirable hero. The complicated implications among audience, time and author lead to the differences between the adaptation and its original. The High Comedy tendency, the open-ended structure and the humorous style in British comedies of manners influence modern Chinese creation of such comedies in three aspects:subject matter, conflicts and aesthetic perception. Ding Xilin's humor in his dramas points to certain aesthetic feelings of British "Seriousness Contained in Humor".