ABSTRACT
The first known work to have been translated into Chinese was The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1853.1 Translation, though the most direct way of putting a western writer’s work in touch with a Chinese readership, was not the only means of introduction. Many late nineteenth-century Chinese intellectuals advo cated the use of fiction to educate the people, and from the early 1900s onwards there were a considerable number of newspaper and magazine articles devoted to the uses of fiction as a tool for social reform in which the accomplishments of western novelists were cited to illustrate the effectiveness of this literary genre in terms of mass appeal. The following are two of the most famous examples of this advocacy:
Arguments such as these, and the citation of western examples of the efficacy of fiction as a tool for social reform, were a direct result of the late nineteenthcentury Chinese intellectuals’ re-evaluation of fiction as a literary genre, a
re-evaluation based on the perceived contemporary needs of Chinese society. Tra ditionally fiction was looked down upon, and only prose and poetry were consi dered true literature which appealed to the refined taste of the scholar class. However, as Chinese intellectuals saw the need to reform their country, first in terms of military and economic know-how and, by the end of the nineteenth cen tury, in terms of improvements at the grassroots level through education, they discovered in fiction a useful tool with which to reach an unprecedented number of readers. In order to pursue their goal of national revival through mass edu cation, they embarked on a campaign which amounted to a reinvention of tra ditional literary norms.3 In line with the development of this basically utilitarian approach towards fiction, foreign authors and their works were cited as examples of the ways in which fiction effectively contributed to the improvement of social conditions in the West, as can be seen in the examples quoted above. It was not until around the time of the New Literature Movement (1919) that the emphasis on western writers shifted from the collective view to a more individualized one. In the mid 1910s, as a result of the gradual adoption of western literary norms, new literary journals began to devote whole articles to individual western writers and their work, thus shifting the emphasis decidedly in favour of canonical and authorial status.
