Translation, Transculturation, and Armchair Anthropology: The Qing Decline As Explained Through Chinese Fiction

• In Event: Signifiers in Motion: The Transmutation of Chinese Texts in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract

In the history of Sino-Japanese literary relations, few works occupy a more visible position than the late-Ming novel Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin). A fictionalized account of an outlaw uprising against the Song court, the text served as a springboard for innumerable Japanese translations, adaptations, parodies, and pastiches during the early modern period. In this presentation, I explore Meiji-period engagement with the novel, with an emphasis on the discourse surrounding its potentially subversive elements. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japanese translators, adaptors, and commentators on the novel had also debated the actions and ethical standing of the outlaw-gallants, the modern period saw the discussion linked to new modes of representing China: a development inaugurated by the possibility of traveling to China and observing political and cultural conditions first-hand. Rather than being read simply for amusement, I argue that the novel came to occupy the status of a quasi-ethnography: a work that was invoked not only to explain the political decline of the Qing empire, but also used to position China within a new schema for conceptualizing and representing Sino-Japanese cultural relations during the Meiji period.

Author

• William Hedberg, Arizona State University