福尔摩斯来中国 : 侦探小说在中国的跨文化传播

侦探小说是一个产生于西方19世纪的现代文体，晚清时期它开始传入中国并迅速风靡一时。在西方翻译作品的影响下，中国本土的侦探小说创作在二十至四十年代达到高峰，诞生了如霍桑、鲁平等中国版的福尔摩斯与亚森罗萍。另一边厢，自五十年代开始，来自荷兰的侦探小说家高罗佩将中国传统的公案小说以西方侦探小说的手法重新包装，赋予了传统的狄仁杰故事现代性的阅读趣味，高罗佩的狄仁杰故事于八十年代被翻译成中文，吸引了越来越多的中国作家与导演对这一人物进一步演绎与发挥。本书考察了这两类侦探小说中国化的尝试。在这些尝试中，侦探小说在不同文化间的传译与改编，成为了观察现代性在全球不同地区生产、流通、翻译与重塑的一个独特界面。
This book turns to the past to trace how the genre took root in the nation from the late Qing period to the Republican era (1896–1949). It historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. This book also identifies two distinct strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction: the first is characteristic of the late Qing period while the second emerged in the Republican period. Late Qing translators and writers tried to assimilate the foreign genre into their own literary tradition, while Republican writers accepted the new genre on its own terms and chose to use Western-style detective narratives as an educational tool to popularize science or to reveal the hazards in everyday life in modern China. Yet after identifying two divergent, or even opposite modes of domestification, this book further argues that there is also a continuity between the detective fiction of the late Qing and Republican periods, which taken as a whole attests the affective experience shared among Chinese people who witnessed the dialogue between the traditional and the modern during these decades of change. Chinese detective fiction of the earlier twentieth century did not accept Western detective fiction and its value system uncritically. It was alert to the danger of materialism and considered traditional morality as an effective antidote. Facing a chaotic time of corruption and bureaucratic malpractice, Chinese detective writers tended to be skeptical of the courts and frequently meted out poetic justice to their characters as a corrective to the flawed judicial system. By treating detective fiction itself as an embodiment of modernity, my close examination of the reception of this genre during the late Qing and the Republican era not only illustrates the varying attitudes, struggles, and negotiations that characterized Chinese engagement with Western modernity during these two periods, but also reflects an ontological issue of the evolution of detective fiction: Detective fiction is a modern genre issued from the West, yet when it gradually became a global presence, its global diversities in turn expand our understanding of the original connotations and possibilities of this genre.