Yan Lianke has enjoyed high prestige in the Chinese literary field since the late 1990s. Internationally, his prestige also increased after being awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 and after being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 and 2016. Yan’s oeuvre has received extensive literary criticism from Chinese and Anglophone scholars. Moreover, eight of his works have been translated into English between 2007 and 2020. However, little research to date has investigated the critical reception and translation of Yan’s fiction in the Anglophone world.
In this context, this thesis has three major aims. Firstly, by investigating the critical reception history of Yan’s fiction in China and the Anglophone world, it contributes to current understandings of how Chinese and Anglophone scholarship have interpreted Yan’s fiction. In so doing, the thesis draws out the ideological implications embedded in the critical reception and paves the way for the paratextual and textual analysis of the English translations of Yan’s fiction. Secondly, by examining the paratexts surrounding the English translations of Yan’s fiction between 2007 and 2020, it reveals the ideological framings underpinning the regular modes of their paratextual representations. Thirdly, taking the English translations of Serve the People! (2007), Dream of Ding Village (2011) and The Explosion Chronicles (2013) as case studies, the thesis analyses the recurring textual translational shifts against long standing attitudes towards China in the Anglophone world.
This thesis has three major findings. With respect to Yan’s critical reception, the thesis reveals that Chinese critics accentuate the universal themes and aesthetic dimensions in Yan’s fiction whereas the Anglophone critics focus more on its social and political critique. With regard to the paratextual projection of authorial and national images, it displays a tendency towards overly politicised readings of Yan’s fiction and casting Yan as a victim of a repressive culture. Moreover, it is found that the paratexts frequently package Yan’s fiction with images of erotic Chinese women and start to praise for his literary achievements after he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014. When it comes to the textual manipulations manifested in the translations, the thesis demonstrates a tendency to attribute relatively negative images to China, Chinese women and China’s politics. Specifically, the alienness of China is foregrounded with the textual representations of an uncivilised and totalitarian regime that is inhabited by a wretched, evil and hyper-sexualised population who is immersed in frantic economic activities.
In sum, this thesis argues that the projection of the national and political images of China and the images of Chinese women in the Anglophone literary criticism, paratexts and translated texts coherently shows a tendency to reaffirm and consolidate Anglophone stereotypes about China, which largely highlight political corruption and repression in alliance with its weak, yet sinister and sexual ordinary people in China.