Alice's China Trip

Alice in Wonderland is among the children’s classics of most popularity, far-reachingness and significance. It demonstrates a child’s dreamland full of childhood innocence, and establishes a unique literary interest in plain, baffled but also amusing language. It gives birth to Alice, a classic child-image which has failed not of a vivid and indelible impression upon its readers for generations.The1921translated version of Alice in Wonderland by Mr. Chao, Yuen Ren realized the translation target for the utmost extent. Not only has it become a piece of reputed Chinese translation, but also achieved a very high place in the New Culture Movement and China’s modern literary history together with the original work. The achievements consist of the following two points:firstly, the translated version has been endowed with certain value in the literary history, since it was one of the evidences and accomplishments for Mr. Chao’s involvement in the process of literature reformation during the particular stage of vernacular Chinese advocating and Chinese Renaissance; secondly, A lice in Wonderland has a great influence on the modern Chinese literature, especially on children’s literature. With Mr. Zhao’s version, its subsequent criticisms and two parodies served as the text basis, the thesis tends to explore the reception of Alice in Wonderland in the contemporary literature, to locate and interpret its deserved position in the literary history.The author hopes that the process will not limits within a historic display only, but will also include some poetic consideration through the clarification of the writers’and scholars’unearthing into the connotative differences of Alice texts. These writers and scholars worked under different poetic backgrounds of different times. Thus, the thesis divorces from the chronological order. The first chapter attempts to briefly reveal the historical process of the reception of Alice in Wonderland in modern China. On this basis, the second chapter tries to clear up its historically artistic influences. First of all, the brand-new linguistic and stylistic features are to be perceived directly. The outstanding translation made Chinese writers recognize that children and child-style (nursery rhyme) can make masterpiece as well, which led to the development of colloquial speech and children’s ballads. In the next place, it establishes a utopian modern concept for child literature through the literary criticisms of Zhou Zuoren, a child literature advocator, who approved and interpreted the literary taste of "nonsense" in Alice as works of "purposeless" and "children’s standard." What is more important, the modern writers have keenly realized the preciousness in Alice the character, and spontaneously inherited the tradition of child-narrator in their later literary works. Therefore, through the analysis of the differences of perspectives in the works, it is visible that how the concepts of "child", or even child literature" have been constructed as the "otherness" for the adulthood and the new literature. It is modern writers’reception of Alice that responds to this historical progress.