| The farsightedness, fascinating plots and logically meticulous reasoning are well-known characteristics of the novels of Jules Verne, the famous prolific science writer. The initial stage of translating and introducing Jules Verne’s works into China can date back to the late Qing dynasty. Not only the large number of translations but also the emergence and early writings of science fiction in China were inseparable with the acceptance of Jules Verne’s works.The period of late Qing dynasty was in the course of great social transformation. The flourishing or perishing of the nation had a great relation with the efforts of the intellectuals, who aimed to rejuvenate the nation. Literature, together with the politics, was regarded as the major means to save the nation, and played a great role during that period. In such a historical context, the translations of science fictions had a strongly utilitarian nature. The theory of "the revolution in the fiction" created conditions for the translations of Jules Verne’s novels, while the rising of mass media expanded the readership coverage of those fictions. There were some conscious structures as the preconditions of reception, and the readers had divert understandings of the novels, therefore, there existed some variations in understanding them during the process of reception.This paper explores the concrete translations of Jules Verne’s novels in the late Qing dynasty empirically and historically under the general background of the translations of them, reflecting whether the aims of "science enlightenment" was achieved from the angle of readers’ responses, and from the perspective of receivers, surveying the internal mutations of the nation and society according to different responses of the publishers, critics and readers. The Moon Colonies Novel, one of the representative works of the science fiction of that time, is taken as an example to analyze the relationship between the origin of this new literary category of science fiction and Jules Verne’s novels, providing some referential resources and some new research thinking to the research of the early period of Chinese science fiction accepting and writings. |
