A Fictional Prescription for National Emancipation: The Translation of Political Novels in Late Qing China

Literature played an important role in the construction of a modern nation-state in late Qing China, when fiction as a literary genre was endowed with strong political and ideological agendas. In fin-de-siècle China, the emergence of political novels through translation from the West, as an important subgenre of “new fiction”, was essentially a response to the nation’s severe national crisis engendered by colonial threat. Against this backdrop, the practical value of literary translation was strikingly emphasized, as progressive Chinese intellectuals took the translation of western-derived political novels as a vehicle of intellectual enlightenment and political engagement, appealing to constitutionalism, nationalism and patriotism. In this context, translators deliberately put political priority over linguistic faithfulness or aesthetic value, turning the process of literary translation into “transcreation”, to propagate their ideals for sociopolitical reforms. Thus, as an important instrument for constructing the nationalist imagination, the translation of political novels served as a fictional prescription for national emancipation in late Qing China, manifesting both a process of cultural (re)construction and an important facet of East–West interaction.