• "Lin Shu." The Chaucer Encyclopedia Edited by Richard Newhauser (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023), pp. 1085-1086

    Contributor(s):
    Alexa Alice Joubin (see profile)
    Date:
    2023
    Group(s):
    CLCS Renaissance and Early Modern, LLC East Asian, LLC Modern and Contemporary Chinese, The Renaissance Society of America
    Subject(s):
    Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400, China, Translations, Adaptations
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Lin Shu, Republican China, Charles Cowden Clarke
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/p6m9-d921
    Abstract:
    Alexa Alice Joubin’s entry expands the global scope of The Chaucer Encyclopedia (4 vols). This entry, in Volume 3, examines the work by the Chinese translator Lin Shu’s (1852-1924). Lin translated and rewrote several key stories from the Canterbury Tales. Joubin argues that Lin’s works exemplify early twentieth-century Chinese imaginaries of medieval England. Joubin conducted philological tracing to reveal that Lin based his rewritings on Charles Cowden Clarke’s 1833 Tales from Chaucer in Prose, a prose rendition of ten tales intended for young audiences. Lin categorized most of the tales as fairy tales. Lin was the most prolific and influential translator of foreign literature in early twentieth-century China, who, in addition to rewriting Chaucer and Shakespeare (see shakespeare, william), rendered more than 180 Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and English dramas and novels into classical Chinese. Joubin’s research shows that Lin’s short stories rendered Chaucer in the Ming- and Qing-dynasty narrative tradition of love, filial piety, and exotic adventures. He applied a Confucian moral framework to turn Clarke’s Victorian rewriting intended for women and children into stories for the predominantly male elites in China. Lin’s texts gave the impression that Chaucer concentrated on fairies and ghosts. Lin used this strategic rewriting to counter the rhetoric deployed by those of his contemporaries who were in favor of totalWesternization and had been influenced by the Enlightenment and rationalism.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1002/9781119086130.ch12
    Publisher:
    Wiley-Blackwell
    Pub. Date:
    2023
    Book Title:
    The Chaucer Encyclopedia
    Author/Editor:
    Richard G. Newhauser
    Chapter:
    12
    Page Range:
    1085 - 1086
    ISBN:
    9781119087991
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 months ago
    License:
    Attribution-ShareAlike
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