Abstract
I argue that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the interactions between Western culture and Chinese-language fictional texts led to a mixture of translation, pseudotranslation, and transcreation in Douglas’s Chinese Stories (1893) and George Soulié’s Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures (1913), thereby creating multifaceted and nuanced images of China. Chinese Stories, a collection of translated traditional Chinese tales, includes stories whose source texts cannot be identified. Chinese Stories belongs to a gray area that challenges the simple dichotomy between authentic translations and pseudotranslations, and produces an image of China that is similar, but inferior, to Europe. The other work examined in this chapter, Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures, is a translation of stories from Liaozhai zhiyi. Similar to Chinese Stories, Strange Stories includes pseudotranslations. I contend that Soulié’s translation uses an imagined China to participate in the Modernist movement and develop new ways of writing English fiction.
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Luo, J. (2022). Images of China in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Pseudotranslation, Chinese Stories, and Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures. In: Traditional Chinese Fiction in the English-Speaking World. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05686-4_4
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