Gautier, Mallarmé and Shu Lin

This book is the doctoral thesis I defended at Sorbonne University in 2021. The Franco-Chinese literary exchanges take the perspective of cross-border exchanges out of a Eurocentrism that constrained the field of study of comparative literature and reinforced the oppositions between identity and otherness, nationalism and exoticism. Focusing on the nineteenth century, this research aims, in part, to illustrate the literary representation of China in the writings of French literati. In addition to imagology, the subject of this study deals with questions of literary translation. As far as China is concerned, the 19th century witnessed its first importation of the foreign novel. Shu Lin’s translation of La Dame aux camélias and Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de Jade are studied in parallel so that transformations, variations, and even deformations in their translation can be analyzed on the following two levels: the historical and cultural context; and the subjectivity of the writer-translator.