Fifteen Junior Heroes’ Adaptive Rewriting Of Fifteen Juveniles

Liang Qichao(1873-1929)is a famous thinker,a revolutionist,a literateur,and a prolific writer in our country.During the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican period,the Chinese nation faced a great choice of its future and destiny.In order to open up a new source of enlightenment to people,Liang Qichao shouldered the responsibility for reforming and changing the society through literary translation and literary creation.Fifteen Junior Heroes is an adventurous science fiction translated and rewritten by Liang Qichao and Luo Pu(1876-1949)in 1902.It’s original work is Deux ans de vacances published in 1888 by Jules Verne(1828-1905),the father of science fiction in France.After the publication of this work,there were several translation versions: the earliest one was the English version by the British in the following year,followed by the Japanese scholar Morita Shiken(1861-1897)in 1896 according to the English translation.While Liang Qichao translated the Morita Shiken’s Japanese translation into Fifteen Junior Heroes in 1902.The work mainly tells the story about fifteen youngsters from a school in New Zealand.They planned to spend the summer vacation traveling by boat,but were trapped in a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean by storm unexpectedly.In order to survive,they explored the island,hunted and tamed animals several times,tried to use their perseverance to conquer nature and fought with the pirates bravely and stubbornly.After the unremitting efforts for two years,they ultimately returned home successfully.This thesis traces the relationship between Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Junior Heroes,which is centered,and Morita Shiken’s Fifteen Juveniles with the method of comparative literature,and explores the adaptive rewriting in Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Junior Heroes based on Fifteen Juveniles.This thesis analyzes the two works from the following four parts.Firstly,it traces and examines the original relation between Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Junior Heroes and Morita Shiken’s Fifteen Juveniles,and explores the process of translation and introduction in depth.Secondly,it examines the innovation of Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Junior Heroes based on Morita Shiken’s Fifteen Juveniles.This chapter mainly analyzes the differences between the Chinese version and the Japanese version in form,structure,language,narrative and other aspects in text forms,as well as images,plots,themes and other parts in text content,and explores how the Chinese version is rewritten creatively according to the social,political,cultural and literary background at that time on the basis of the Japanese translation.Thirdly,it analyzes the reasons for Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Junior Heroes’ rewriting of Morita Shiken’s Fifteen Juveniles.It mainly concludes the underlying causes from four aspects: the social background,the audience,the translator’s intentions and cultural selections.Lastly,based on Fifteen Juveniles and the innovations in Fifteen Junior Heroes,it examines Fifteen Junior Heroes’ significance for the modern novels,social thoughts and Oriental and Western literary exchanges.It traces the translation process of Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Junior Heroes from Fifteen Juveniles in Japanese,compares the differences and similarities between these two works,and focuses on the analysis of the reasons and significances of the adaptive rewriting in Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Junior Heroes so that it can reveal the grand literary communication and exchanges between modern Chinese and foreign literature when China in its early 20 th century takes Japan as the medium to introduce and study the Western thoughts and cultures,and use foreign literature to reform and national thoughts and shape the soul of the nation.It can further comb the process of goal-oriented acceptation and rejection of Japanese and Western cultures.In addition,it opens new perspectives and enriches the study and referential materials on Fifteen Junior Heroes,providing new literary materials and cultural references for the field of comparative literature study to some extent.