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Title |
“Newspaper Man” in China: The Reception of Mountain Spirits: Selected Short Stories from Korea and Taiwan and Yang Kui’s Short Story |
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Author |
Liu, Shu-Qin |
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Professor, Department of Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University |
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Abstract |
Yang Kui’s short story “Newspaper Man” is extremely important in the history of the exchange of left-wing literature, for it is not only the first short story in the history of Taiwan literature published in a magazine of Japanese literature, but also the first Taiwanese short story translated into Chinese and Esperanto and introduced to China. The course from “Shimbun Haitatsu Fu (Prequel)” to “Newspaper Man” translated by Hu Feng inscribes the journey in East Asia taken by a short story of the colony. The paper analyzes the reception of “Newspaper Man” in China, a short story circulated in Taiwan, Japan, and China, by investigating the contexts of editions and literary reception and scrutinizes the role Yang Kui played in the left-wing corridor in East Asia by examining different reception contexts in the literary circles in China and Japan. Focusing on the three earliest editions, “Shimbun Haitatsu Fu (Prequel)” (first edition), “Shimbun Haitatsu Fu” (full edition), and “Newspaper Man” translated by Hu Feng (Hu Feng’s edition), I first explore the background of this short story when it was originally released in Taiwan; next, I examine the contexts when the edition translated by Hu Feng appeared in World Knowledge, Selected Short Stories from Minor Cultures, and Mountain Spirits: Selected Short Stories from Korea and Taiwan; finally, I explain how the trend of translating minor literatures prevalent in Shanghai in the 1930s influenced the reception and interpretation of Taiwan left-wing short stories in the literary circle in China. |
