Controversy, Censorship and Translation: The Chinese Reception of D. H. Lawrence``s Lady Chatterley``s Lover

Abstract

This book examines the Chinese response to Lady Chatterley s Lover in both the 1930s and 1980s by focusing on attendant issues of state censorship, the publishing trade, the readership, translators and literary critics. Lawrence`s novel was translated into Chinese in the 1930s, and its re-issue in the 1980s was the cause of a major censorship controversy where popular aspirations for greater freedom of speech, state backlash and an increasingly market-driven publishing industry all combined to catapult this literary classic into realms beyond the literary and into the cultural and socio-political. A study of the reception of this novel in China thus offers crucial insights into two important periods in China`s long project toward modernization and nation-building.