Shelley's Scattered Words in China

Abstract

This essay reflects on Percy Bysshe Shelley's peculiar afterlife in twentieth-century China. It first traces Shelley's reception history by discussing his introduction during the late Qing era, the Republican popularisation of Shelley, and Communist China's curious endorsement of him. From this almost undisrupted trajectory of increasingly enthusiastic advocacy, sharply contrasting with Shelley's controversial English critical heritage, the essay argues that Chinese readers of Shelley radically appropriated him. It then attempts to tease out the complex forces at play in this process by proposing two major means of appropriation: reduction and transmission. Reduction was achieved by censoring unacceptable elements in Shelley's poetry, philosophy, and biography. Meanwhile, Shelley was almost exclusively transmitted through an authoritarian critical discourse. Linguistic transmission played a crucial role as well, and Chinese translation often toned down certain quintessential Shelleyan stylistic features. The essay concludes that the uneasy relationship between Shelley's poetics and politics might have encouraged Chinese appropriation which, ironically, was made by an authoritarian state ideology and institution – the very powers that Shelley had so fiercely opposed.