Abstract
This paper discusses Byron’s reception in twentieth-century China, focusing on three stages: first, the introductory stage from the 1900s to 1940s, in which Byron’s particular significance for Chinese readership will be examined by highlighting the popularity of “The Isles of Greece” and the large-scale commemoration of Byron’s centenary in 1924; second, the politicising stage from the 1940s to 1970s, when Byron experienced a drastic re-evaluation by the Soviet standard of revolutionary Romanticism and Mao Zedong’s Yan’An Talks (1942); and third, the restorative stage following the Cultural Revolution. The paper thereby suggests the helpless passivity of literary texts when being caught in a foreign context that underwent ideological vicissitudes, but also reveals the tenacious endurance of Byron’s poetry that allowed it to survive these violent changes.
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Acknowledgments
These terms are borrowed from Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). They are apt to describe the metamorphosis of Byron in twentieth-century China as well. As Butler’s book stresses the importance of revolutionary politics in interpreting Romantic literature, so this paper looks at Byron’s Chinese reception against its turbulent historical context.
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Li, O. (2019). Romantic, Rebel, and Reactionary: The Metamorphosis of Byron in Twentieth-Century China. In: Watson, A., Williams, L. (eds) British Romanticism in Asia. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_8
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