維多利亞《紅樓夢》：晚清翻譯小說《紅淚影》的文學系譜與文化譯寫 = Literary Genealogy and Cultural Adaptations of the Victorian Dream of the Red Chamber: Late Qing Translated Novel Hongleiying

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, great inspirations and challenges are brought to local cultural brokers in Eastern Asia by the wide circulation of Victorian dime novels, one of which is Dora Thorne (1883) written by Victorian popular literature writer Bertha Clay. By tracing its circuitous travel to Meiji Japan and late Qing China, this paper presents the literary genealogy of its translated version, Chen Mei-Qing’s Hongleiying (1909) and analyzes the cultural adaptations in the travel of the text and their implied meanings. The Hongleiying is apparently influenced by Dora Thorne and Kikuchi Y?h?’s adaptation Chiky?dai (1903); however, a more important issue of Chen’s version is its imitation of Cao Xue-Qin’s masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber. Intriguingly, the Chinese classical novel serves here as the mediation between Chinese and Western cultures that helps Chen to create his own “Victorian” narrative. Moreover, the numerous enlightenment topics discussed in the Hongleiying shape this novel into a model of xinxiaoshuo “new fiction” that Liang Qi-Chao promotes in his enthusiastic essays. Late Qing literati’s imaginations and representations of the Western world are formed by absorbing and transforming foreign texts and by appropriating traditional Chinese novels. It is also in this manner that the Dream of the Red Chamber’s significance and classicality are strongly confirmed once more.