The Two-way Misreading:Byron’s Oriental Imagination And The Rewriting Of Byron In The Orient

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) is one of the most eminent representatives of Romantic poets in the English literature during the 19th century. In the West, Byron enjoys a higher reputation than he does in his own country owing to the attraction of his unique, distinctive personality and exotic flavours in his works. In China, Byron’s fame is much higher than that of his contemporaries. There has been nearly a century for China to translate Byron’s works, which seems that China has had "a love affair" with Byron for almost a hundred years. During the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic period, there was an upsurge in the introduction of Byron.Orientalism in Byron’s works is laid special emphasis by previous studies in the postcolonial discourse; the rewriting of Byron in China from the Orient is analyzed plainly from the ideological motivations and poetological constrains in the cultural context. This thesis furthers their studies by recognizing that the two phenomena are cultural misreading, either unconscious or conscious. Due to different value systems and cultural connotations in different cultures, there are necessarily insoluble sparks flying between different cultures, especially between two heterogeneous cultures, like the East and the West, that is to say, cultural misreading is inevitable. The literal meaning of cultural misreading indicates a wrong interpretation of a culture, which is regarded as a hindrance to cultural exchanges. However, from the perspective of cultural construction, cultural misreading is a kind of cultural filtering, or the otherization of a culture. In this sense, it’s not merely a negative cultural phenomenon, but plays a dynamic role as a cultural strategy.With the study object of Byron’s works, this thesis analyzes Byron’s Oriental imagination and the rewriting of Byron in China from the Orient during the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic period within the framework of cultural misreading. To conduct the study, first of all, the definitions and classifications of cultural misreading are introduced, and the relationships between cultural misreading and the author, and translation are discussed. Then, Byron’s Oriental imagination is analyzed in the two aspects of Oriental figures and Oriental religion, from which it’s concluded that it’s a kind of unconscious cultural misreading; The rewriting of Byron in China is analyzed from the translations of "The Isles of Greece" during the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic period, from which it’s concluded that it’s a kind of conscious cultural misreading. At the end of this thesis, the positive and negative effects of cultural misreading are derived from the analyses of the two researches carried out above. After the analysis of the thesis, a theoretic discovery though preliminary is made:the cultural misreading between the East and the West arises from the need to construct their own cultures, a process during which there are at once positive and negative effects.