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Utopia Refracted through Mandarin Lenses
Liu, Yi-Chun ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Spinozzi, Paola (referee) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
This dissertation, entitled Utopia Refracted through Mandarin Lenses, examines the legacy of Thomas More's Utopia (1516) in three aspects: translations, paratexts, and afterlives. It explores how Utopia - as a book and as a construct - has been appropriated into the Mandarin context during the process of linguistic and cultural transfer in the acts of translation. Employing close reading, instrumental case study, and the concept of paratexts to survey fourteen standalone Mandarin translations of Utopia, this study aims to fill in the gap of a previously neglected aspect of utopian studies, especially its paratextual apparatus, which has been almost entirely overlooked (with only one exception in 2003) since its first translation in 1935. This dissertation is structured into four chapters: the first chapter contextualises Utopia in the original Renaissance context by providing its early publication history (Latin and English) and by analysing the modes of narrative - fiction and dialogue - in which More's self-fashioning is manifest and where his hypothetical heterocosm is materialised. All this substantiates how fiction, dialogue, and paratexts are integral to the shaping of Utopia, without which a holistic reading is not feasible. The second chapter examines the introduction of the concept of...
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