Narratological creativity in translating fairy tales: the case of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber in Chinese

Angela Carter (1940—1992) is one of the most widely studied postmodern writers, renowned for her subversive fairy-tale rewritings and feminist literature. This thesis offers a comparative analysis of Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) and 严韵 [Yen Yun]’s Chinese translation (2019), investigating how the translator creatively participates in the narrative reconstruction of literary works at the narratological level. To approach this aim, the thesis is organised around the following three major research questions: how the translator’s creativity is manifested and negotiated at the narratological level; what contextual factors—social, cultural, and institutional—enable or constrain the translator’s role as a creative agent in narrating the stories; and what practices and strategies are effective in translating fairy tales. By addressing these research questions, this thesis is the first to introduce the concept of “narratological creativity in translation”, defined as “patterned and generative translation shifts (or changes) that stem from the translator’s internal attentiveness and effectively fulfil narratological functions”. This form of creativity is understood through the original translation criticism developed in the four case studies (Chapters Three to Six), which collectively analyse Yen’s approach across all ten stories in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. These studies focus respectively on nonhuman characters, feminist characterisation, sex-related events, and violent domestic space. To address the second question, Chapter Two investigates the publishing context and Yen’s multiple identities as a translator, poet, and feminist, outlining the social, cultural, and institutional factors that shape her creative agency. Following the comparative analysis, the concluding chapter synthesises the findings to argue that narratological elements are a fundamental and relevant influence in the translation of fairy tales.