Misled by Literature

This book explores the profound influence that reading translated works had on readers in early twentieth-century China, focusing particularly on the impact translated love stories had on perceptions of love, desires, the self, and the world, shaping real life behaviors of the readers, both historical and fictive ones.

The volume charts the rise of Chinese readers’ obsession with translated romantic literature, following the proliferation of foreign literary works translated into Chinese at the turn of the twentieth century. Liu draws on the framework of “Bovaristic reading”, inspired by Bovarysm, understood as an obsessive approach to reading where the boundaries between fiction and reality becomes porous, which allows for a clearer understanding of how readers’ engagement with translated works spurred them to consider and long for lives and selves different from their own. The book analyzes historical evidence of young adults’ reading practices from the time, autobiographical writings of modern Chinese writers, and literary representations and parodies of the phenomenon. Taken together, this book not only allows for further insights into debates on the “counter-enlightenment” in this period in the modern Chinese cultural sphere but also the powerful role of reading in our understanding of ourselves and the world.

Combining theoretical, textual, and historical analyses, this monograph will be of interest to scholars from a variety of fields, including Chinese literature and culture, the study of reading and reception, Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and World Literature.