Visual narratives in digital books : adapting the Chinese novel Journey to the West for culturally diverse audiences

Abstract

Scholarship in narrative studies has tended to explore the relationship between the recent development in digital storytelling and the audience’s reception. Despite initial scepticism, digital books have rapidly gained popularity, largely due to their convenience and vast technical support of portable reading devices. By maximizing the unique storytelling capability of digital books, many independent enterprises have harnessed this new narrative form to engage their readers through interactivity. However, the way in which storytellers and their audiences interact through digital books is not yet fully understood. This scholarship has been comparatively sparse and has left gaps in our knowledge about the relationship among storytellers, the medium of digital books and the target audiences. Culturally specific narratives in digital form have garnered little attention and demand further studies, especially in the context of globalisation. This thesis seeks to expound upon our understanding of digital books’ potential to relate local stories to culturally diverse audiences. It suggests an interactive approach to storytelling and applies its findings to retell one of the world’s most famous stories, the Chinese novel Journey to the West. The story’s variety of adaptations offer a great resource to examine the relationship between storytellers and their audiences as well as the cultural challenge of storytelling. Within the intellectual framework of adaptation study, convergence of media and visual narratives, this thesis employs a comparative approach to examine selected case-studies of JTW. Making extensive use of visual analysis, the research explores these most essential research questions: • How can the story of JTW be brought to a global audience while honouring its cultural background and origin through the use of illustrated e-books? • How can the negotiation between global appeal and local traditions help define parameters for visual adaptations? In the practical application of the research, this thesis examines the interplay between digital books and the readership’s engagement to retell the story of JTW to the digital audience. It does so by adapting the story as an illustrated e-book with limited animation and interactive elements. The medium of digital books lends itself to the hybridity of animation studies, illustration studies and visual narratives. Through theoretical research and practical work, this study explores various narrative strategies and how they can be implemented using digital illustration in an interactive book format. It contributes to our knowledge of visual narratives in the digital context by exposing the current state of the art of digital media and how these can be utilised to engage with the readership. This research also makes visible the ways in which visual narratives in digital media can answer the challenge of telling local stories, and thereby provides a means to facilitate negotiation between cultural elements in local stories and their culturally diverse audiences. Its conclusions call for further research into the future of visual narratives that scholars and storytellers can draw upon, and into the possibility of employing digital media to transcend cultural boundaries in storytelling.