A Study On Famous Chinese Short Stories From A Narratological Perspective

Lin Yutang, a world-known literary translator, outstanding linguist and bi-lingual writer whose writing and translating career is complimented by the couplet “One mind seeks the learning of ancients and moderns; Two legs straddle the cultures of East and West”. His work Famous Chinese Short Stories is a volume that are selected for and retold to western readers. However, this masterpiece seems to have been grossly underemphasized during past decades. Only a few scholars at home conducted relevant researches from perspectives such as functionalism and manipulation. So far, no one has attempted to study this work from the perspective of narratology.The theory of narratology came into being at the end of the 1960 s. Then some scholars began to adopt this theory into the field of translation criticism and succeeded in some way at the end of the twentieth century. From then on, narratology has increasingly played a significant role in contemporary western literary criticism. Narratology falls into two schools that include the classical and the post-classical. The former focuses on the narrator’s ways of expression on the level of discourse while the latter pays more attention to interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the theory of classical narratology will provide the theoretical foundation for this study.The objective of this thesis is to study Lin’s Famous Chinese Short Stories from the narratological perspective to find out how Lin successfully represented the narrative features of the original texts as well as to illustrate the influence of the transferences in the translation.Through the study, this thesis comes to the following conclusions: although Lin retold these traditional Chinese short stories in a new form, the source texts’ aesthetic value and thematic meaning have been conveyed through Lin’s transferences; narratology can serve as guidance for the appreciation and analysis of literary translation. In the mean time, this thesis intends to invite other people’s valuable ideas on the appreciation of Famous Chinese Short Stories.