From Bildungsroman to historical fiction: the genre variation of the translation of Bronze and Sunflower

Bronze and Sunflower (Qingtong kuihua 青铜葵花), a Chinese novel by Cao Wenxuan published in 2005, is considered a Bildungsroman in its source culture but is marketed as a work of historical fiction in its target Western culture, thereby entrusting a history-teaching duty to a book that primarily aims to portray teenagers’ personal growth trajectories. This paper aims to explore how this transition of literary genres occurs, its effects on target readers, and the motivations that underlie the transition. The paper examined relevant interviews, notes, blog posts, and book reviews to recount the actions undertaken by the multiple agents who contributed to the transition, revealing that the literary agent’s pitch, the publisher’s notes, critics’ guidance, and readers’ interpretation and acceptance interacted synergistically to make Bronze and Sunflower be taken as a work of historical fiction in the target culture. This genre transition inevitably resulted in unfulfilled expectations and mismatched functions in the translation’s reception. We attempt to argue that this genre variation is attributed to the two cultures’ asymmetrical genre spectra and the unequal cultural exchange from the periphery to the center in the literary field. It demonstrates that the seemingly trivial issue of genre matters, not only because it can influence the reception of a translated work but also because it can reveal the tacit power relations in the translation flow.