Children’s Gothic in the Chinese Context: The Untranslatability and Cross-Cultural Readability of a Literary Genre

As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999­–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability within the context of cross-cultural communication, this study compares the Gothic manifestations in the original English-language series and its Chinese translations. A comparative analysis shows that the Gothic elements are diluted in the Chinese version’s translation, re-illustration, and repackaging of the original, reflecting a tendency towards moral didacticism and localization. Taking together the educational emphases of Chinese children’s literature with François Jullien’s aesthetics of blandness, this paper argues for the commensurability of the diluted translation with the Chinese cultural-educational system, as well as draws poetic implications from the translation of a literary genre that is simultaneously pedagogical and transgressive

Familiar Forms, Strange Uses: Paratexts, Narrative Interventions, and the Queering of Possible Worlds in Illicit Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Britain

“Losing” one’s self in a story is one of the great pleasures of reading. Key to this act is the “transport” of the reader into the storyworld. Nineteenth-century British narratives offered various transport modes, including prefaces and footnotes designed to orient the reader to the storyworld and narrative interventions designed to align the reader with the values of that world. Yet this act of transport was fraught with tensions and anxieties in the nineteenth century. Worries about the dangers of reading, especially the dangers for women and the lower classes, abounded; much of the worry stemmed from fears that these readers would not be able to tell the difference between “good” and “bad” reading materials and between facts and fictions – that these readers would be tainted or corrupted by the act of reading. Illicit narratives of the nineteenth century appropriated forms associated with more aboveboard narratives. In borrowing prefaces, footnotes, and the direct address of readers, these illicit narratives cloak themselves with the appearances of licit stories. Illicit narrative is not a genre – it is an umbrella term for those narratives classed by contemporary society as unsuitable reading materials. Gothic novels, sensation fiction, and erotica are illicit narratives as are newspaper reports and scholarly texts on taboo subjects. Rather than being a stable category, the term “illicit” is subject to change based on societal norms; that which was considered illicit in the 1830s may seem tame by the 1890s. This project explores the uses of paratextual and narratorial interventions in a selection of illicit British narratives from the nineteenth century. Classifications of narratives as illicit are based on contemporary views of the narratives. Moreover, for the purposes of this project, only those illicit narratives centering on gender, sex, and sexuality will be considered. Drawing on the concept of possible worlds from narrative theory, this project explores the ways in which these interventions work with and against the content of the narratives to create queered possible worlds for the reader

Remediating the Past: Doing “Periodical Studies” in the Digital Era

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Towards a paracontextual practice* : (*with footnotes to Parallel of life and art)

PhD Thesis (images have been removed from E-version for copyright- request print to see images)This thesis concerns the question of the site for spatial practice. Drawing on Carol Burns’ and Andrea Kahn’s notions of ‘cleared’, ‘constructed’ and ‘overlooked’ sites within architecture, it proposes that a site is a construct of an array of contextual traces beyond perceptible boundaries, opening up to other sites, and asks how might phenomena not immediately present be acknowledged, in order to develop a practice for analysing the ‘empty’ site? The thesis turns toward forms of spatial writing as developed by Jane Rendell and others, and to Gérard Genette’s literary theory of paratext — which explores the marginal elements of a literary composition, including footnotes — to develop a new practice that is paracontextual. Whilst artists and writers have acknowledged and interrogated these phenomena within their own works, this thesis asks: what potential is offered by an interdisciplinary translation of these methods to spatial practice (practices between art and architecture)? Paratextuality is explored here as a spatial phenomenon in relation to the Independent Group’s exhibition Parallel of Life and Art (ICA, London, 1953). The exhibition’s ‘Editors’ (including photographer Nigel Henderson and architects Alison and Peter Smithson) gathered figures from numerous publications (including National Geographic Magazine, Journal of Iron and Steel Industry, and Life Magazine) as a spatialisation of sources, but the images were mounted without wall labels — each source credited only within a supplementary (paratextual) catalogue. It was in the process of studying the installation photographs that I discovered two figures had disappeared from the gallery walls. By coincidence, these images were both of sites, and of voids: the excavation site for a skyscraper, and a meteor crater. The thesis is structured in two parts. A detailed study builds on the work of critics, writers and artists such as Robert Smithson, Sophie Calle, Emma Cocker, and Marlene Creates to propose possible paracontextual practices that extend beyond the literary limitations of Genette’s paratextual phenomena. A paracontextual practice is developed in response to the empty sites of the missing figures of the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition. The missing images provide an ‘empty’ site from which a fictional exhibition, Craters, and an accompanying catalogue are represented through a series of textual–spatial explorations, which extend from these images to the bomb–sites of post–war London beyond the original Parallel of Life and Art gallery, and to the Smithsons’ own theories in relation to holes within the city. On the one hand, the thesis presents a new paratextual interpretation of the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition, but on the other, as paracontextual practice the textual–spatial explorations of the Craters exhibition and catalogue are offered as a model that could be developed to account for the para– phenomena — the supplements, the sources, the craters — of other ‘empty’ sites

The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, and Queer Books

The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, and Queer Books studies the multimedial art of decorated books of the British Aesthetic Movement (1880-1900). Incorporating textual scholarship and queer theory, the project considers how the language of sexual intercourse, as it was expressed through Aestheticism’s conception of Eros, influenced a textual intercourse between literary content and bibliographical design. Paying particular attention to the influence of book design, typography, and illustration, the decorated book is reread as a total work of art that is realised when diverse concepts of beauty and eroticism are bound together in a single edition of a book. The result of these diverse artists collaborating on the creation of beautiful books for publishers The Bodley Head and Leonard Smithers Ltd., was a queer revision of literature as a material art form and of the book as a multimedial medium of creative expression capable of circulating a discourse of beauty and sexuality realised through the integration of literary and material creative expression. Chapter 1 places the emergence of the queer book in the history of the nineteenth century’s Revival of Printing, paying particular attention to the influence of William Morris’s work with the Kelmscott Press and what he called his “Ideal Book,” in order to demonstrate how the collaboration of Oscar Wilde, Charles Shannon, and Charles Ricketts on A House of Pomegranates expresses Aesthetic ideas of beauty within the material exigencies of industrial bookmaking practices. Chapter 2 looks at John Gray’s volume of poetry, Silverpoints as the product of a textual intercourse between the author and the book’s designer, Charles Ricketts, in order to explore how the performativity of Gray’s Aesthetic persona – an Aesthetic ideal momentarily realised in Gray’s recitation of his work – finds a life of its own in the material book. Chapter 3 revises Linda Dowling’s philological concept of the “fatal book” in order to read Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley’s bibliographical collaboration on Salome for The Bodley Head, as a Decadent ars erotica, a text that represents sexual dissidence as a sacred cultural discourse. Chapter 4 examines Leonard Smithers’s publication of The Savoy as a queer periodical by revising the act of reading as a masturbatory textual intercourse between contributors practicing self-reflexive critical analysis. The project concludes with a look at the sexual politics that leads to the demise of the queer book within British Aestheticism