Topic: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in China: Reading the Text through the Earliest Chinese Illustrations
Time: 2021.11.5 09:30-11:00
Speaker: Sandro Jung
Location：行政楼1504
Introduction of the speaker:
Prof. Jung has published more than 130 A&HCI-listed articles, 9 monographs, more than 50 peer-reviewed book chapters, and articles, and edited more than 10 collections of essays. He is the Director of the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture and the Head of the Literature team in the SUFE School of Foreign Studies. His special areas of interest are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature as well as comparative literature and media studies (including expertise in French and German literature).
Abstract:
This lecture will contribute to the mapping of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in the non-English-speaking world by focusing on the reception of the work in early twentieth-century China. It will focus on the four woodcuts that accompanied a partial translation of Swift’s text, which was published in the Shanghai-based magazine, Tapestry Portrait Novel (1903-1907). This magazine published translations of 18 foreign works (including novels and novellas from Germany, Britain, Poland, and the United States of America) alongside a range of Chinese novels. Seeking to introduce foreign texts of world literature, Tapestry Portrait Novel was distinguished by its including more than 800 text-interpretive woodcuts, which visualized important scenes and episodes from the works they accompanied. This lecture will read the woodcuts to Gulliver’s Travels as imagological filters that use Chinese representational and artistic conventions and that render the work in terms that would have countered its cultural difference and otherness. The lecture will show that, even though these woodcuts have not previously been studied in relation to other visualizations of Swift’s text, they have a culture-formational purpose which helps readers to understand the text not only through the adaptive mechanisms of the translations but also through the iconic lens of the illustrations.