Controversy, Censorship and Translation

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.