Ian Watt, Hau Kiou Choaan and the Rises of the Novel

The Chinese realist novel Hau Kiou Choaan, also known as The Pleasing History, was published in English translation in 1761, the year of Samuel Richardson’s death, making it the first Chinese novel translated into a European language. Yet Hau Kiou Choaan, and the ‘talent-beauty’ genre to which it belongs, were largely ignored in the West for more than two centuries. This paper explores why, until very recently, the Chinese novel had so little influence on English literary history and criticism, a neglect that culminates in Ian Watt's now-classic account of the ‘rise of the novel’ in 1957. It begins by examining the political, intellectual and commercial contexts in which Thomas Percy published his translation, before turning to the context in which Watt wrote The Rise of the Novel. Drawing on Marina MacKay’s recent work on Watt’s experience as a prisoner of war, it argues that Watt's neglect of the Chinese novel was not incidental but structural: Hau Kiou Choaan’s realism is in important respects incompatible with his account of the novel as an expression of Western modernity

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Irish and British Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies