自從梁啟超倡言「欲新一國之民，不可不新一國之小說」以來，不僅引發小說界革命、激發以小說教育啟蒙大眾的思潮，時人大量引介並取法外國翻譯小說的做法，也因此盛極一時。在品目繁多的各類翻譯小說中，「教育小說」無疑極為特殊且值得關注。原因是，在政治、偵探、科幻小說之外，它是另一不同於傳統說部之作的類型小說，為當時中國讀者開啟了迥異的閱讀視界；另方面，它的敘事重在體現青少年的奮鬥成長及學校教育生活，恰恰呼應了當時憧憬「少年精神」、強調教育啟蒙的社會現實，並為青少年的學習成長，提供具體的參考範式。然而，在引進西方「教育小說」的同時，晚清文人原也不乏著眼於教育問題、投射種種「教育想像」的小說書寫。從晚清小說家自撰的白話「教育」小說，到以文言引介翻譯的歐西「教育小說」，所涉及的，不僅是中西新舊文白等問題的糾結互動，也是時空論述與少年想像的翻新，是文學傳統與現代性的往來交鋒。其間，更因文化生產工業介入，導致諸多複雜互動，因之而體現的各種問題，值得深究。本文將以清末民初教育小說最重要譯述者包天笑（1878-1973）的翻譯及創作文本為切入點，就當時「教育」與「小說」、「傳統」與「現代」、「商業」與「啟蒙」等問題，進行多方面探討。

Liang Qichao’s famous dictum “Whoever wants to reform the people of a nation must first reform that nation’s fiction” led not only to a revolution in fiction writing and provoked the idea of using fiction to educate and enlighten the masses; his contemporaries also took to translating and imitating a great amount of foreign fiction. On the long list of translated titles, “educational fiction” undoubtedly occupies a special position and deserves our attention. This is because educational fiction—besides political fiction, detective novels, and science fiction—constitutes one more new fictional genre (as opposed to the traditional shuobu fiction) that presented contemporary Chinese readers with a radically new reading experience. At the same time, their narratives emphasized the turbulences of growing up and life in the schools and educational institutions, matching neatly a social reality characterized by the yearning for the “spirit of youthfulness” and a stress on education and enlightenment. Thus, they provided the young generation with a concrete model for studying and growing up. Yet while importing Western “educational fiction,” the late Qing literati were also committed to questions of education and began to write their own works on diverse forms of “educational imagination.” The vernacular “education” fiction produced by late Qing writers and the “educational fiction” imported from the West and translated into classical prose do equally deal not only with issues such as the foreign/Chinese, old/new, and classical/vernacular binaries; they are also new patterns for temporal and spatial narratives and the imagination of the youth, they are a site of contestation between literary tradition and modernity. Moreover, the advent of industrialized cultural production brought with it multiple complex interactions and led to the surfacing of numerous problems that await our attention. The present article starts from the translations and works of Bao Tianxiao (1878-1973), the foremost pioneer introducing educational fiction in the late Qing and early Republican era; it aims to investigate the various issues associated with “education” and “fiction,” “tradition” and “modernity,” and “commercialism” and “enlightenment.”