This special issue, with featured articles by Wu Xiaofang, Yao Dadui, and Carlos Yu-Kai Lin, represents the latest studies of cultural interaction and comparative literature for the modern China period. From the perspective of the translation studies, these articles, respectively, examine the English translation of “westward journey stories” contained in a script of Tongzi erama, the translation and re-adaptation of Aesop Fable, and the translation of Western literature regarding the rise of modern Chinese concept of “Xiaoshuo”.

The earliest English translator of Xiyouji is claimed by scholars to be Samuel I. Woodbridge (1856-1926), an American missionary to China, who published his translation in 1895. According to Wu's research, however, the original text of Woodbridge’s translation is not Xiyouji, but the third book of the “Thirteen and a Half Sacred Books”, a series of scripts of Tongzi erama in Nantong, Jiangsu Province. Woodbridge presented in his translation a negative image of China as a country of political corruption, moral depravity and religious ignorance, and in so doing he implied that China and the Chinese people could only be saved through the way of the Christian mission in China. The first full Chinese translation of Aesop’s Fables was rendered by the cooperation of Robert Thom and his Chinese teacher in Guangzhou. Later this translation was reprinted for many times (sometimes with modifications), and circulated in treaty-port cities in mainland China and beyond. The circulation of the text accompanied some retranslations and adaptations, such as Chen Chunsheng and Samuel Woodbridge’s re-translation of Aesop’s Fable in Chinese and Cheng’s own imitative work "Dongfang Yishuo" (Oriental Aesop). The re-translation and adaptation of Aesop's Fable illustrate the circulation and reproduction of world literature in modern China.

The word “fable” is translated into Chinese as “yuyan” (寓言), while the genre “fable” in Western literature is not the same as the genre “yuyan” in Chinese context. So does the Western genre of “novel” to the Chinese concept of “xiaoshuo”. The last article of the special issue looks into the problem of how this term “xiaoshuo” came to translate the modern concept of novel. Lin argues that the merging of “xiaoshuo” and “novel” reflects an ongoing epistemological negotiation between the Chinese and Western literary traditions.

In short, these studies represent the most cutting-edge results of a long-neglected area in cultural interaction and comparative literature in modern China. And these cases also reflect the emerging area in the theory of world literature and the complexity of its implication in modern Chinese context.