Comparison Of The Role Of Mythological Characters In Qu Yuan’s Poetry And In Prometheus Unbound

Generally speaking, culture and literature enjoy a close relationship. Culture is an important element in literature and literature can reflect the essence of culture. By reading articles or works from different countries or regions, we can easily find the cultural differences behind them. The author chooses two great works as the literature material for analyzing and supporting the poets’ purpose, one is Qu Yuan’s poetry and another is Prometheus Unbound. The first one is from China and second one is from Great Britain. In general, most people think China is a collectivistic country. The thoughts and social behaviors of Chinese people all have the characteristics of collectivism. Therefore, being a Chinese writer, Qu Yuan is inevitable influenced by Chinese culture and there is no doubt that the dominate element is collectivism. In the same reason, individual element widely exist in Prometheus Unbound, Although the two works for different periods, cultures, countries, but in the expression of two works on the subject they have cited a number of myths and select a variety of mythological figures to convey their spirit, ideals and aspirations. Qu Yuan chooses Kun Lun mythological characters to express their great collective spirit, loyalty and patriotism of his descendants which has not been praised. Prometheus Unbound is the English Romantic poet Shelley’s poem. It is taken from Greek mythology to express his power against the will. There is always a very strong spirit of individualism. About these two works, previously there have been many scholars have done a lot of research from different perspectives, such as religion, translation, character analysis. It has very few people by focusing on two poems in the mythological figure of individualism and collectivism, and from this point to study these two works. In this paper, I choose Li Sao, Nine Songs and Prometheus Unbound to comparison.This paper uses comparative literature and comparative mythology to analyze and summarize the final summary of the purpose and significance of the Western myth of the comparison from the mythological role, and thus it is more conducive to spread the Eastern culture to Western.In this paper, the great significance of doing researching about Qu Yuan’s poetry by Comparative Literature and Comparative Mythology is to spread the Chinese literature to the world, make foreigners understand Qu Yuan’s poetry, enhance the influence of Chinese literature and correct the image of Chinese Literature in the West.