부산대학교 도서관

This essay treats and investigates the Chinese parodies of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a phenomenon of literary and cultural exchange. Carroll’s novel was translated into Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao in 1922, after which there appeared many Chinese sequels extending the storyline. These sequels demonstrate an unusual uniformity in terms of the literary genre they adopt, i.e., travel writing, and the structural design of placing China under a British girl’s tourist gaze. Focusing on three of them, i.e., Shen Congwen’s Alice in China (1928), Chen Bochui’s Miss Alice (1931), and Ziqi’s Alice’s Travels in China (1935), this essay intends to reveal the underlying mechanism regulating the collective choice made by these writers. As is the same in these sequels that Alice is taken as the gazer to gaze at China, the current study, from Alice’s perspective, unfolds itself from four aspects, i.e., what to gaze, how to gaze, what the gaze is like, and who Alice is. Regarding what to gaze, John Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze is employed to describe the gazing scope of Alice. In investigating how to gaze, the application of the travel writing genre to the parodies is investigated. As for what the gaze is like, Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny helps to explain Alice’s gaze as a tool that defamiliarizes the Chinese land. In the last section about who Alice is, a psychoanalytical reading is conducted to examine the real identity of Alice who is found as the double of the male writers overwhelmed by an “obsession with China.”