Introduction

As English is a global language, the English versions of novels have a better chance of worldwide circulation. Therefore, publishers are often more ambitious in producing bestselling world literature when initiating an English copyright purchase, translation, or publication. To gain acceptance in a target literary market, literary works often undergo minor to major rewriting, depending on aspects such as the author’s fame, literary norms, the translator’s cultural identity and ideology, the target literary field’s dominant ideology, the translator’s and editor’s interpretations of the book, and the assumed elements of a bestseller. Among these, the editor’s judgment is probably the most decisive, especially in the U.S., where editors have more agency to reshape a novel. What could be the concerns or motives behind framing and rewriting foreign novels? Are they related to world literature’s attributes?

Publication and international circulation of translated books are generally addressed from sociological perspectives and functionalist or polysystem approaches to translation. For example, Gisèle Sapiro (2008) applied Bourdieu’s economy of symbolic goods and field theory to the sociology of translation, emphasizing how publishers’ strategies influence translation practices and stereotype reception. Conversely, Hélène Buzelin claimed that the mutating publishing industry may make “traditional models lose their explanatory power and new empirical data would be needed” (Buzelin, 2006, p. 138). Buzelin’s work is an ethnographic study of the literary translation process of works co-published and co-edited by independent publishers that involved collaboration between translators and senior editors to cater to diverse Canadian readers.

Considering this context, we applied David Damrosch’s (2003) framework of world literature to examine its ties with literary production, circulation, and reception. Our goal was to identify the attributes of world literature in a way that provides readers with either a framework or a set of theses to argue with, depending on their inclination. We explored how these attributes relate to publishers’ framing and translators’ rewriting mechanisms. Finally, we addressed the lack of sufficient empirical studies on literary reception by exploring how online book reviews influence world literature’s circulation and reception and the feasibility of using computer-aided tools to analyze such reviews.

Taking Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2008), translated by Howard Goldblatt, as an example, we observed the publisher’s framing during the publication and publicity stages as seen in paratexts on its book covers and in newspapers. Through textual analysis, we compared the original and translated texts paragraph-wise and noted discrepancies (mainly deletions) between them. To prove whether these framings and rewritings were effective, we collected Amazon reader comments to determine the frequency of certain themes and understand reader evaluations of the translation and writing.

In this emerging era of big data and a huge corpus of world literature, Franco Moretti (2013) proposed “distant reading” for world literature studies using digitalized texts and computational methods. These quantitative approaches include multiple corpus analysis tools, ranging from supplying a list of hierarchical keywords based on their frequency (Pérez1 & Sanz, 2021) to topic modelling based on textual features (Navarro-Colorado, 2018). Our study compared the effect of close reading and distant reading using a computer-based content analysis tool, WordStat. We extracted topics from Amazon and Goodreads reader comments and compared the results with our interpretation of the Amazon reader reviews.

General attributes of world literature

Damrosch (2003) pointed out the external conditions for world literature’s formation, such as translation, production, and international readership markets, and thus revealed general attributes of world literature other than literariness. From his example of The Epic of Gilgamesh, we can see the importance of relevance to readers in the circulation of world literature. Discovered in Mesopotamia in the 1950s, The Epic of Gilgamesh gained public attention and financial support, largely due to its connection with Biblical stories (Genesis flood narrative) and Greek epics (Odyssey). Thereafter, the tablets engraved with the epic were transported to England and finally translated from Akkadian and other extinct languages into English (Damrosch, 2003, p. 64). Furthermore, the charm of The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro, 1990) lies partly in the interculturality of Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born British novelist. Written by an outsider to both British and Japanese cultures, this work reflects quintessential/stereotypical English and Japanese qualities, crystalized in Stevens’s character (the butler): professionalism and dignity. Stevens’s blind loyalty to Lord Darlington is reminiscent of the Japanese during World War II. Therefore, this veiled familiarity and cultural otherness fascinates Japanese, English, and other international readers.

Second, world literature features both cultural peculiarities and universality. Without cultural peculiarity, it loses the enchantment of cultural otherness and the richness of culturally specific references; without universality, it loses scope for cross-cultural understanding. Today, universality in literature is a contentious topic, criticized as “a hegemonic way to stifle the diversity of human experience” (Waseem, 2013, p. 268). However, undeniably, “a work can enter world literature by embodying what are taken to be universal themes and values” (Damrosch, 2003, p. 213). Accordingly, the Chinese Book of Songs, created 3,000 years ago, and ancient Egyptian love poems written on papyrus can be appreciated even by today’s readers. While “universality itself is not an eternal and unchanging concept” but “a culturally situated, strategic emphasis” (p. 135), there exists a general humanity that makes cross-cultural communication possible. When literary works cross cultural borders, two opposite tendencies emerge: homogenization and differentiation, prevalent in the commercial and literary/academic book markets, respectively (Sapiro, 2016). This is not to say that commercial markets lack works with cultural peculiarities. While too much strangeness can prevent readers from connecting with a work, moderate peculiarity is a marketable niche. For example, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China’s portrayal of peculiar Chinese customs impressed many readers, as shown in Amazon reader reviews. Even nationally specific works can resonate with foreign readers if they address common issues, universal themes, or the inner needs of a local audience. Therefore, world literature works constitute local expressions of universal concerns.

Third, to gain worldwide readership, a novel’s accessibility is very important—especially with regard to translation. As the standard for good translation varies with time, a translation should be judged “only with respect to a certain place and a certain time, in certain circumstances” (Lefevere, 1982, p. 9). Thus, contemporary readers’ reception may constitute an effective measure of a translation. However, emphasizing accessibility does not imply advocating assimilative translation; an overtly assimilated translation loses its exotic appeal and cultural reference; for example, Lin Shu’s translation of La Dame aux Camélias in the late Qing Dynasty (Dumas, 2017), which reads like a traditional Chinese novel in a foreign setting. Damrosch (2003) suggested that “works of world literature are best read with an awareness of the work’s original cultural context, but they typically wear this context rather lightly” (p. 139). Accordingly, a preferable translation should have moderate foreignness without losing readability.

Paratexts and publishers’ framing

Framing, a purposeful presentation of information to influence an audience’s interpretation and choice, is a widely used theory in mass communication and sociology. David H. Weaver (2007) understood framing as “select[ing] certain aspects of an issue and mak[ing] them more prominent in order to elicit certain interpretations and evaluations of the issue” (p. 142). Mona Baker (2006) introduced four types of framing strategies in translation: selective appropriation of textual material, temporal and spatial framing, labelling, and repositioning of participants. In this study, framing implies that publishers manipulate activities to influence readers and potential readers through editor’s and translator’s appropriation of the source texts, publicity campaigns, and paratexts (the primary focus here), such as labels, selectively quoted book reviews, translator’s notes, and blurbs.

Paratexts are instrumental in directing readers toward certain aspects of a book. Gérard Genette (1997) defined paratext as a text that “enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (p. 1) and assigned it a function-based role as “anything [that] provides some commentary on the text and influences how the text is received” (p. 7). Valerie Pellatt’s definition is more inclusive: “We regard paratexts as any material additional to, appended to, or external to the core text that has the function of explaining, defining, instructing, or supporting, adding background information, or the relevant opinions and attitudes of scholars, translators, and reviewers” (Pellatt, 2013, p. 1). We adopt Pellatt’s definition to involve extensive digital epitexts in our discussion.

Paratexts include peritexts and epitexts (Genette, 1997, p. 5). The former has a definite scope: anything within the book other than the main body (e.g., title, subtitle, preface, foreword, dedication, epigraph, notes, afterword, blurbs, and illustrations). Genette (1997) included peripheral elements such as jackets, bands, and slipcases because they also serve as communication between the author, readers, and publisher. Epitexts include texts that are outside a book but related to it, such as interviews, reviews, private letters, publishers’ marketing materials, newspaper articles, and reader comments. However, its scope further extends to adaptations and derivatives of the original work, such as translations, movies, television series, or games, and therefore to their reviews and other paratexts as well. Consequently, epitexts can positively or negatively influence a work’s reception. Taken together, the meaning of paratexts thus extends and deviates from Genette’s argument that paratexts “ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the author’s purpose” (Genette, 1997, p. 407) because how publishers frame a novel to entice the audience may even deviate from the author’s original intention.

Taking Wolf Totem as an example, the book’s peritexts reveal Penguin’s framing of the book, both for cultural peculiarity and universality; meanwhile, epitexts, such as newspaper book reviews and Amazon reader comments, show how Anglophone readers have received the book.

The publisher’s framing of Wolf Totem

Wolf Totem tells the story of Chen Zhen, a Beijing student sent to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) to live as a shepherd among Mongolian herders in the steppe. Chen was fascinated by the battles between the herders and the grassland wolves; this inspired his reflections on the military secrets of Genghis Khan, the respective characteristics of Han Chinese and Mongol peoples, and the wolf spirit’s influence on China’s history and civilization. Mesmerized by wolves, Chen raised a wolf cub with love and care. Nevertheless, the cub died of a throat wound while trying to break away from its leash. With the Han leaders’ arrival and the demand for increasing the productivity of animal husbandry, the wolves were killed, and the once breath-taking grassland turned into a desert.

Wolf Totem, a literary sensation in China, sold one million copies within a year of its initial release in 2004. Its English copyright was bought by the Penguin Publishing Group in 2005 for 10% royalties and an advance of 100,000 U.S. dollars—the highest for any Chinese novel selling abroad at the time. The book was translated by Sinologist Howard Goldblatt and won the Man Asian PrizeFootnote 1 in 2007 before its publication in 2008. It has now been translated into more than 26 languages and sold in 110 countries. Its Kindle and Audible versions were sold on Amazon, and a film adaptation of the same name was released in the U.S. in September 2015.

Reasons for purchase of rights

Jo Lusby, Penguin China’s managing director, explained the reason for purchasing the rights to Wolf Totem by highlighting the book’s potential popularity in the West: “It is about man and nature, modernity and tradition, man against wild, leadership, and environmental damage. It is about many other things that we are familiar with in the West” (Liu, 2011).

Adrienne Clarkson, the chairperson of the three-judge panel of the Man Asian Literary Prize stated, “This masterly work is also a passionate argument about the complex interrelationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture.” Printed on the book’s back cover and cited in The New York Times’ art report (Van Gelder, 2007), this quotation portrays the novel as one that transcends national boundaries. It is not just about the Mongols and Han Chinese, but also about nomads and settlers and humanity and nature. Consequently, the book is perceived as relating to the whole of humanity, with a universal appeal.

Framing strategies

As indicated above, from the beginning, Penguin saw many selling points in Jiang’s novel. Apart from the universal ecological message, the story of the wolf, the author’s mysterious past, the Cultural Revolution, and the Han–Mongol relationship are other enticing aspects that aroused readers’ interest. Thus, the 2008 edition’s book covers highlighted both universal themes and cultural peculiarities. However, the political framing of the Cultural Revolution and the author’s political life were not actively received, as shown in Amazon customer reviews. Accordingly, Penguin discarded these framing devices for the 2015 edition.

Attention-grabbing labels

Labelling is another framing method in which tags are attached to a book to highlight its selling points. Often, publishers select a powerful phrase from a literary review to define a novel. Wolf Totem’s front cover quotes a phrase from The New York Times: “a stirring allegorical critique of Chinese civilization” (French, 2005). Additionally, a badge saying “Winner of the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize” highlights the book’s remarkable achievement, while Penguin’s familiar logo also serves as an endorsement. The prestige of the Man Booker Prize reflected in the Man Asian Prize and Penguin’s reputation as an internationally renowned commercial publisher constituted powerful cultural capital for the book.

Framing political controversy

The 2008 and 2009 editions featured a starred review by Kirkus Reviews (“Wolf Totem,” 2008a). It highlighted Wolf Totem “outselling others in Chinese history short of Mao’s little red book”Footnote 2 to indicate its popularity while alluding to the Cultural Revolution. Quotes from The Guardian (“Living with wolves,” 2007) emphasized the controversial nature of the book and the author while recognizing his achievements both in China and internationally. Apart from displaying the book’s cultural capital, the deliberately chosen peritexts revealed the publisher’s intention to publicize the book using political overtones, using words such as “controversial,” “escaped a ban,” and “the Cultural Revolution.” Given the popularity of historical memoirs about the Cultural Revolution in the U.S. (Geng, 2008) and the usual accusation of the Chinese government’s censorship of books on sensitive political issues, publishers often use such tags as advertising gimmicks for Chinese novels.

Such political framing is also evident in the translator’s note, which generally functions as the preface for translated works and has “connotative value” (Genette, 1997, p. 93). In Wolf Totem, Howard Goldblatt’s “Translator’s Note” interprets the book mainly in terms of Chinese national character, using the author’s metaphor of sheep for the Han Chinese and wolves for the Mongols and the wolf spirit as “an antidote for what ails Chinese society.” “The symbolic relationship between the herdsmen and the wolves” and their participation “in a delicate ecological balancing act of keeping at bay the Gobi” are other messages conveyed (, p. vi). Notably, Goldblatt’s note contains the following information about the Cultural Revolution:

Despite its remote location and hostile environment, Inner Mongolia was not spared the excesses of the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when the nation was on war footing, arrayed against domestic enemies of the state and international enemies of the nation, real and imagined (Jiang, 2008a, pp. v–vi) (emphases mine).

Goldblatt also explains the Mongolian herders’ conflicts with Han leaders, whose campaign to “Destroy the Four Olds” (old thoughts, old culture, old customs, and old practices) threatened their traditional beliefs and nomadic lifestyle.

The paratexts above reveal Goldblatt’s intention to guide readers’ attention to the book’s ideological and political background while assuming that American readers prefer novels with political overtones (Ge, 2013, p. 221).

Framing universal themes and relevance

Both the 2008 and 2015 editions of Wolf Totem cite comments by the Man Asian Literary Prize’s judges to universalize the themes of “nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture.”

In its sensational marketing campaign, Penguin set up a Mongolian yurt on the bank of the Thames, convened a seminar on nomadic culture in Melbourne, and held a reading salon in Los Angeles. Penguin and Changjiang Literature and Arts Publishing House co-organized a press release for the book, inviting Goldblatt as a special guest. These activities indicate how economic capital works to promote a book’s circulation.

The 2015 edition contains the following blurb:

Searching for spirituality in 1960s China during the Cultural Revolution, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen travels to the pristine grasslands of Inner Mongolia to live among the nomadic Mongols—the descendants of the Mongol hordes who once terrorized the world—who coexist in perfect harmony with their beautiful but exacting natural environment. At the core of their beliefs is the notion of a triangular balance between the earth, man, and the fierce, otherworldly Mongolian wolf whose fates are all intricately linked; the wolves and the Mongols are both facing extinction.

The few wolves that haunt the steppes are locked with the nomads in a profoundly spiritual battle for survival. By adopting a wolf cub of his own, Chen’s fascination blossoms into obsession, and ultimately reverence. But when the peace is shattered by the intrusion of modernity, the age-old balance is disrupted, and life on the grasslands will never be the same. Part period epic, part fable for modern days, Wolf Totem is a stinging social commentary on the dangers of overaccelerated economic growth, and a heavy immersion into the heart of Chinese and Mongolian culture (emphases mine).

Blurbs are a major means of enticing readers (Pellatt, 2013, p. 3). Lyrical descriptions of a pristine environment with a harmonious relationship between nomads and wolves heighten the sadness of losing them to modernity. Genghis Khan and the Mongolian hordes are prominently mentioned to strengthen the Mongolian culture’s relevance to readers. Furthermore, political and historical criticism of China is replaced by the conflict between modernity and tradition and overaccelerated economic growth and ecology, which concern contemporary Western society.

Beneath the blurb is passionate praise from the National Geographic Traveler: “electrifying,” “a triumph of cross-cultural connection and understanding, written by a son of one tribe that too often seems intent on subjugating the other” (George, 2010). This quote generalizes the book’s cultural background to widen its appeal by emphasizing the message of cultural reconciliation.

Wolf Totem’s framing is a typical case illustrating Sapiro’s observation about publishers adopting two opposing strategies for better circulation: “politicized/depoliticized and universal/particular—that structure the space of reception of translated works” (Sapiro, 2008, p. 129).

Wolf Totem rewritten

In literary production, commercial markets and academic readerships prefer reader-oriented and source text-oriented translations, respectively. Given publishers’ concern for accessibility, translators must often rewrite the text to accommodate readers’ expectations, especially for literature that is marginal in the target literary field. Chinese novel translators, such as Howard Goldblatt, Nicky Harman, and Bruce Humes, recall “editorial intervention” happening at the “backstage of the translation show, unbeknownst to the reader” (Basu, 2011).

After Wolf Totem’s release, the translator’s right to rewrite was deeply questioned: “Journalists, bloggers, and dissertation-writers keep asking [Goldblatt] why he chose to drop a large section, about 30,000 Chinese characters, from the book’s postscript” (Basu, 2011). Wolfgang Kubin, a German sinologist, also criticized Goldblatt for deleting substantial portions reflecting Han culture, dubbing this an act of disloyalty to literature for the sake of creating a bestseller (Kubin, 2009, p. 72). Kubin’s argument represented a scholar’s expectation of faithful literary translation.

In a self-interview, Goldblatt quoted a letter written to him by Beena Kamlani, his Penguin editor, to defend himself against accusations of taking liberties through substantial deletions:

What remains now is to make it more accessible to Western readers, which I think will be principally achieved by making some (many) strategic cuts.…my initial thinking is that the book could be cut by roughly one third or so… It is clear that there are many repetitive phrases, passages, even concepts that could be skimmed away quite easily (Ge, 2011, p. 102).

Kamlani initiated the cuts, and her role was significant and authoritative. Her primary concern was the book’s accessibility for Western readers.

In an interview, Kamlani stated that as an editor, she does not usually write for the author (or the translator for translated works) but only discusses her suggestions with them (Gross, 2008). Nevertheless, the final work is a collaboration between the translator and the editor. Although Kamlani initiated the truncation, Goldblatt determined the sections to be deleted and rewritten. Analyzing the differences between the original and English versions reveals Goldblatt’s and Kamlani’s cultural sensitivity, literary aesthetics, interpretations, and awareness of readers’ expectations.

What is rewritten and why?

A close comparison revealed that the translated version was reduced by at least a quarter (but less than a third). Apart from truncating the 30,000-character lecture at the end, the most conspicuous deletions are the quotations from historical works at the beginning of each chapter, including one about the Quanrong tribe taking the wolf as its totem 3000 years ago. The remaining deletions comprise: (1) Culturally loaded words (historical stories, figures, poems, allusions, stories of Genghis Khan’s soldiers); (2) Lectures on Chinese and world history, human evolution, and wars; (3) Discursive arguments; (4) Exaggerated sentiments and descriptions; (5) Information on stock-raising; and (6) Less-relevant subplots and characters.

The deleted and rewritten portions suggest that the editor and translator wished to make this a compelling story for Anglophone readers, as evident in the following aspects: stylistically, deleting rambling speeches, didactic lectures, polemic arguments, scientific details, and other argumentative elements to make the novel concise and gripping; literarily, accommodating Anglophone readers’ expectations regarding tone, voice, and pace; culturally, universalizing the story by downplaying Chineseness; practically, improving readability by deleting redundant subplots and characters; and emotionally, reducing potential negative feelings by omitting nationalist statements and scenes of brutal animal killing.

Overall, the rewriting aimed to conform to Anglophone readers’ expectations of fiction. Deleted, for example, are pages-long dialogues on human evolution, the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire, repeated argumentation of the relationship between declining national spirit and wolf-killing and between Confucianism and agrarian culture, and whether “labor creates the man.” Also deleted are discursive thoughts and sentimental narrations, such as on the relationship between the wolf and civilization.

Some rewriting attempts aimed to mitigate negative feelings caused by grotesque scenes, for example, depictions of extremely brutal animal slaughter, perhaps to avoid offending animal lovers. Others may have been deleted for plausibility, such as descriptions of a wolf with an open abdominal cavity still swallowing a dead horse’s meat and horrified horses treading on their own abdominal organs that wolves had ripped out. Exaggerated sentiments, such as Chen Zhen’s feelings of gratitude to the wolves for protecting the pristine grassland and swan lake are deleted, along with six paragraphs of Chen interpreting the wolf cub’s howls (Jiang, 2004, pp. 242–243), perhaps because the editor/translator considered them overly romantic or unbelievable.

The rewriting also indicates a tendency to cater to Western readers’ ideologies. For example, Goldblatt translated “你们汉人就是骨子里面怕狼” (literally “You Han Chinese fear wolves to the bone”) as “A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones” (Jiang, 2008a, p. 1), deliberately replacing ethnic identity with national identity. Jiang Rong strongly protested this point. While Goldblatt recognized how it would be perceived by Chinese people, he insisted that his translation reflected an “accessibility” concern, because American readers are unaware of the various ethnic groups in China. To him, choosing the “right words” to match the character’s ideology and capture “[his] readers’ attention fell within the translator’s autonomy” (Ge, 2011, p. 102). In another instance, Goldblatt’s explanation identified Vladimir Lenin as a “Russian dictator” (Jiang, 2008a, p. 267) instead of “伟人” (great man) (Jiang, 2004, p. 171), which clearly contradicts the author’s intended representation.

The rewriting also involved deleting or toning down strong (Chinese) nationalist comments evincing hatred for the Japanese (remarks on the Nanjing massacre, bushido, and Japanese fascism). For example, the following words were deleted: “陈阵眼前突然出现了南京大屠杀的血腥场面。他在狼性中看到了法西斯、看到了日本鬼子” (The bloody scene of the Nanjing Massacre suddenly appeared in front of Chen Zhen. He saw fascism and Japanese devils in wolf nature) (Jiang, 2004, p. 56).

Moreover, the rewriting downplayed the novel’s Chineseness through at least 20 deletions of culturally loaded words and passages. Examples include the story of envoy Su Wu, who was detained for 19 years by the king of Hun in the Han dynasty, and discussions of other historical figures, such as communist soldiers Dong Cunrui and Huang Jiguang, who sacrificed their lives during the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). The long lecture comprising over 30,000 Chinese characters at the end of the book, reflecting Chinese history and national spirit, was also deleted. The deletions were presumably because of their irrelevance to the plot, unfamiliarity to Western readers, and concern for readability (by reducing footnotes).

The novel also underwent minor rewritings, such as paragraph reconstructions and other editorial-type changes; for instance, information about sky burial found on different pages was combined. Goldblatt also included a supplementary map depicting Inner Mongolia’s geographical position at the beginning of the book and a glossary of typical political terminology during the Cultural Revolution at the end of the book.

Overall, Wolf Totem’s reader-oriented rewriting indicates the translator’s and editor’s aspirations to retain moderate cultural peculiarity, while increasing global (mostly Western) appeal.

A brief comparison of different translations

The Japanese edition (2007) 神なるオオカミ (Divine Wolves), translated by Tang Yaming, a Chinese Japanese, and Kikuko Sekino, comprises two volumes, totaling 1029 pages, not only without substantial deletions but supplemented with detailed notes of culture-loaded words. However, when it comes to the judgement of Japanese soldiers, there are some minor modifications. For example, the negative terms “日本鬼子” (Japanese devils) and “小日本” (small Japanese) are translated into “日本軍” (Japanese soldiers). In addition, the original association of bushido with fascism is removed by breaking their concurrence. For example, Chen Zhen compared the wolves’ suicidal attacks with “武士道法西斯主义” (bushido fascism) (Jiang, 2004, p. 60). The Japanese edition keeps the metaphor of fascism and deletes bushido (Jiang, 2015a, p. 192)Footnote 3 showing the translators’ cultural identity and awareness of Japanese readers’ feelings. However, although the English version deletes many emotional and controversial comments about Japanese soldiers, Goldblatt was true to the emotion of the characters during conversations by using the phrase “Japanese devils” (Jiang, 2008a, p. 95) and “samurai fascism” (p. 96).

Considering other translations of the book, limited by our language expertise, we can only compare them in terms of major deletions with the help of Google Translate. Like the Japanese version, the Korean version (Jiang, 2008b) comprises two volumes, totaling 1064 pages, without major deletions. However, the German (2010), French (2015b), and English (2008a) versions are much shorter, 704, 571, and 527 pages, respectively. The German edition is relatively long because it retains most of the arguments and thoughts of the characters. All three Western versions have substantial cuts in the Epilogue and the history lecture at the end of the book, while the German and French editions keep the quotations from history books at the beginning of each chapter. Another striking difference is that the title of the German edition is Der Zorn der Wölfe: Roman, meaning anger of wolves, indicating the theme of nature’s revenge.

Major deletions in the English, German, and French versions indicate the translators’ common judgement of the novel’s structure; in particular, the French and English versions demonstrate awareness of the novel’s readability and reception.

Reader responses

While discussing interpretative communities, Stanley Fish mentioned that meaning production is determined by the “existing conventions or norms of a particular interpretative community” (Selden et al., 1993, pp. 59–60). Considering the literary reception tradition, these interpretative communities comprise elite literary critics and scholars, who write literary history and define reader responses, and “literarily competent readers” who, as Jonathan Culler argued, are trained to understand literary conventions (pp. 62–64). Previously, individual recipient opinions were largely invisible to the public, and only published literary reviews constituted “public opinion.” However, online book reviews have tremendously increased reader participation in the public literary discourse. Hence, analyzing individual reader responses and their contribution to a work’s interpretation would enable a fair evaluation of the work’s position within a social-historical context and literary history. Such data could also reveal reader expectations of literariness and their understanding of literature, life, and society, thus enabling an empirical study of literary works.

With numerous paratexts produced online through Amazon, Goodreads, and similar websites, the influence of mass reader opinions on literary reception, production, and history deserves analysis and evaluation. Despite their subjectiveness, online book reviews provide ample, first-hand, and largely honest responses to books. Online readers form a reading community and a reading salon held diachronically, whose comments influence subsequent readers, provided the platform does not delete their reviews. For an empirical reception study, such data can be analyzed through computer-aided tools, facilitating content analysis concerning topic extraction, keyword frequency, and factors influencing readers’ positive or negative responses.

To determine the effect of framing and rewriting, we performed an in-depth analysis of Amazon reader comments. We chose Amazon over Goodreads because Amazon’s mechanisms for publishing book reviews for registered accounts are more stringent, requiring a verified email and phone number and a minimum expenditure on the site in the past year with credit or debit cards (Mccluskey, 2021), reducing the possibility of fake reviews. However, to test the applicability of WordStat (a content analysis tool that is effective for big data) in reception studies, we incorporated both Amazon and Goodreads reviews for analysis and compared the results with our interpretation of Amazon reviews.

Wolf Totem’s Amazon ratings (4.5 average among 226 global ratings from 2008 to 2015; 152 reviews) indicate that it is well received. A statistical analysis of topics or aspects of the novel that most impressed readers revealed the following: 59 comments referenced Mongolian culture (such as nomadic lifestyle, Genghis Khan’s military secrets, and sky burial), followed by comments on ecological balance and human–nature relationships (54 times); wolf spirits (28 times); history (25 times); political and social critique (18 times); the Cultural Revolution (12 times); and the idea of Chinese national psyche (8 times), including the metaphor of sheep for the Han Chinese and wolves for the Mongols.

The publishers launched a new edition after the Wolf Totem movie was released in September 2015 and reframed the book with different peritexts. By comparing the reviews from March 2008–September 2015 with those from October 2015–December 2021 we investigated whether the reframing reflected reader responses (see Table 1).

Table 1 Amazon reader comments about Wolf Totem
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Effects of framing on readers

Table 1 shows that Wolf Totem’s portrayal of ecological themes and Mongolian culture has consistently impressed Anglophone readers over the years. However, the focus of the new edition is markedly different, plausibly because Penguin changed its framing focus in response to online reader reception from 2008–2015 and National Geographic Traveler’s review. Noticeably, political critiques of China and the Cultural Revolution appeared more frequently in comments from 2008–2015 than in those from 2015–2021, indicating that Penguin’s new framing somewhat influenced responses after 2015. Other influencing factors include the following: the movie’s focus on the themes of wolves, humans, and nature; the changing global political and social context, such as a growing concern about climate change since 2015 (Funk et al., 2020); and the mutual influence of online readers, who increasingly see the novel from an ecological perspective.

With a relatively small corpus of 77,000 words from Amazon and Goodreads, WordStat extracted a maximum of nine topics. The non-negative matrix factorization method helps provide multiple topic modelling solutions; we chose the solution that was most pertinent to the novel’s themes. Table 2 presents the results. To save space, we only list the representative keywords.

Table 2 Topics extracted using WordStat
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The topics in Table 2 are generally consistent with those in Table 1. In Table 2, “Jack London” and “Wolf Attack” can be categorized as “wolf spirit,” and “God Tengger” represents “Mongolian culture.” With a larger corpus, computer modelling can provide more topics with different perspectives.

Our results reveal that the publisher’s framing is effective but not fully decisive. Although Penguin’s production and marketing efforts framed the novel in several ways, the audience could freely choose the aspects they wished to react to. Most positive reviews indicate that readers resonated with the book and found it meaningful. They choose to receive a foreign literary work in a way that is relevant to them, yet different from their knowledge and experience, and to be enlightened accordingly. Damrosch (2003) saw world literature as “a mode of reading, a detached engagement with a world beyond our own” (p. 297). Thus, when we immerse ourselves in a different cultural world, world literature can provide fresh perspectives on our own circumstances.

Digital platforms have made mass readers visible and audible; they are no longer a silent majority. Online readers are a new force shaping literary reception, and their comments are instrumental to a book’s circulation and success. Penguin Random House U.S. reported that 42% of its printed books were sold online (Schmidt & Park, 2013). According to Chevalier and Mayzlin’s (2006) examination of the effect of consumer reviews on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, “consumers actually read and respond to written reviews, not merely the average star ranking summary statistic provided by the Web sites […] an incremental negative review is more powerful in decreasing book sales than an incremental positive review is in increasing sales” (p. 346). In short, “customer word of mouth affects consumer purchasing behavior” (p. 354).

Unlike professional book reviews, online reader comments enable spontaneous sharing of personal reading experiences, providing first-hand resources for reception analysis regarding different interpretations, the relationship between literature and life, and a book’s significance in certain social contexts. Readers universalized Wolf Totem as having “ramifications for people living everywhere,” “a parable for our time of global warming” (by “Mary Wylie”), and “a sad story that is happening everywhere on our planet” (by “Trevanna Grenfell”). Impact-wise, it was “a life-changing read” and “relevant to our times” (by “Diane U”). Reflecting on America’s environmental destruction, “David Bentley” mentioned that the book inspired him to feed the litter of foxes in his neighbor’s barn. Readers with usernames Birdman, Doyle Graham, and CP Teroerde contemplated wolf-hunting in the American West and Western Europe; “Mike D” saw the novel from the perspective of Native Americans’ forceful integration. Four readers claimed that the book was a “classic” or “a must-read for later generations.”Footnote 4

The above analysis and reviews indicate that mass readers’ comments, ratings, recommendations, and word-of-mouth marketing can be instrumental in the reception, circulation, and canonization of world literature. Consequently, Wolf Totem is perceived more as a warning against ecological imbalance and an elegy for nomadic culture under modernity than a radical metaphor for Chinese national character.

Considering the ephemerality of digital literature (Viires & Laak, 2021), to utilize digital epitexts as first-hand resources for reception or other digital humanities studies, it is significant to collect and archive them by conducting digital literary projects or establishing online databases (Bovcon, 2021).

Effects of rewriting

Regarding Wolf Totem’s style and translation, 20 readers felt it was beautifully written or translated. However, among the 34 critical reviews, 13 criticized it for repetitive arguments, some even suggesting deleting 100–150 pages; 10 disliked the implausible dialogues with imbedded history lectures and subplots exaggerating the wolf’s capability; five were put off by the grotesque brutality toward animals; and five criticized the preaching polemic tone. Similar criticisms can be seen in newspapers and book review magazines. The New York Times critiqued the novel for weak characterization and a lack of “complexity and density,” for omitting “significant emotional as well as political details” and adding “intrusive commentary” (Mishra, 2008). Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly (“Wolf Totem,” 2008b) and The Washington Post (Jenkins, 2015) criticized it as “mak[ing] little impression” and being “perfunctory,” respectively.

The negative reviews mentioning repetition and discursive lectures indicate that the translator’s and editor’s motives for rewriting were indeed consistent with Anglophone readers’ expectations. Without their deletions, negative reviews may have been even harsher. In fact, for some readers, more extensive cuts were expected for accessibility.

Several readers expressed regret that this could have been a great work if it had been less repetitive and preachy. This leads to the question: What is more important, the novel’s second life in the world market or the original flavor and cultural details? Accusations against Goldblatt seem unjust from the perspective of the Skopos theory, a functionalist approach to translation advocating purpose- and audience-driven translation strategies.

In rewriting Wolf Totem, what is gained or lost? Is it like gaining a work of world literature but losing the author’s soul? We believe that this is not the case. While the scholarly view of Chinese history and anthropology may be lost, as contained in the original version, this loss is not critical because, among many functions of literature, such as appealing to readers’ hearts and minds and knowledge sharing, literature is supposed to be “an exploration for a set of values to live by” (Hall, 1941, p. 394). What is gained is a widely circulated work of world literature with a worthy message that nature is more important than the human agenda of modernity. In this sense, translation can be seen as a balancing act between gains and losses.

Conclusion

Defining world literature as a product of translation and circulation and as a mode of reading/reception places it within specific contexts of cultural production. World literature’s general attributes—relevance to readers, a combination of cultural peculiarity and universality, and accessibility—could help explain publishers’ framing and rewriting choices. In this digital age, mass readers’ word-of-mouth recommendations not only stimulate circulation but can also shape literary reception. Their diverse understandings enrich literary interpretations, and their common interests converge at universal themes. Their comments can be used to test the effectiveness of framing and rewriting and, in turn, reaffirm publishers’ criteria for book selection, providing a valuable reference for literary translation and dissemination.

Given the quantity of data available on online book reviews, future research applying content analysis tools, such as WordStat and Thematic, in reception studies could focus on comparing the effectiveness of these tools and their topic modelling algorithms.