Influences of Translated Children’s Texts upon Chinese Children’s Literature

Abstract

The year 1898 witnessed the beginning of western children's works being translated into Chinese by Chinese people. Some of 'Aesop's Fables' were translated and published in a newspaper entitled Wuxi Baihua Bao. In the same year, Daniel Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' was also translated and published in China. The following years saw more and more western children's works translated into Chinese (see Li 2004). Yet it was not until the year 1922 that the Chinese writer YE Shengtao (1894-1988) created and published the first collection of fairy tales entitled 'The Scarecrow' in China. This marked the beginning of Chinese children's literature. This paper adopts the methodology of the Influence Study from Comparative Literature Studies to investigate the influences of translated western children's works upon created Chinese children's literature. To be specific, the method of chronology and doxologie are singled out.