George Eliot’s East Asian Afterlives

Abstract What do George Eliot’s novels look like as world literature texts? How do they function beyond an anglophone context? Tracing literary translations and adaptations published in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan from the 1860s to the present, this chapter explores, through paratextual close reading, the literary afterlives produced and perpetuated by Eliot’s global editions. From abridged editions and illustrated children’s series to Fei Ming’s modernist novel Bridge (1925), Eliot’s works proliferate throughout East Asia, repackaged for new, often younger audiences. Eliot’s simultaneous unfamiliarity and canonicity on a world stage poses a productive contradiction: global readers recognise and recanonise Eliot by engaging in myriad forms of nonreading, forging new literary values and uses beyond Eliot’s realist legacy.