| The thesis presents a case study of the cross-cultural reception. Through close textual reading, it first offers a detailed and objective description of the interpretations of the English novel Jane Eyre from the late 1910s to the year 2000 in China (mainland China predominantly). This leads to the exploration of the shaping factors of this history in each distinctive period it has displayed. The thesis then dwells on the analysis and assessment of those factors, their interplay during this span of time, and their respective roles in the reception of a foreign work of literature in the Chinese historical and cultural context.The reception falls naturally into two interrelated parts, the reception of the common readers and that of the literary critics. The popularity of the novel with the general reading public is inferred through various channels: readers" letters, public opinion polls, book reviews, some autobiographies, remarks scattered in other sources, the number of its Chinese translations and their printing histories, information on the internet, etc. Generally speaking, the popular Chinese conception of the novel is that it is a gripping and moving love story and an inspiring one of the dogged strife against the prejudices and iniquities of the society for the dignity and due rights of a human being. These aspects, namely, love, the defiance of the heroine, and the way to women's emancipation, have also been the most enduring topics of the scholarly papers. In comparison, the interpretations of the critics are more diversified and more historically distinctive, exhibiting a close relationship with the social and historical realities of China.Initially the novel was introduced into China as a work of realism and most of all a work of a woman writer. The earliest mention of the Bronte sisters was found in the series on "Western Women Novelists ( (^W^cdnA^i^fflS)) )" published in the Ladies ' Magazine ( <(t! ;&5V-i； ) in Shanghai in 1917. The next introduction was in History of the Development of the English Novels ( ^SMsi＃^l3&?), a book translated by "Zhou Junzhang et al (JWJ5$) in 1924." In July 1931, a special issue of "Women and Literature" of the Ladies' Magazine carried the article "The Bronte sisters in the English Literature (^Ett'T^^lft $?." The first Chinese translation of the novel is the abridged version by Wu Guangjian it). It was finished in 1927 but was not available to the reader until 1935. The following year the first unabridged translation by Li Jiye ($S=?) went off press. From then on the popularity of the novel has been on the rise.The 1910s to the 40s was an age of fundamental cultural innovation and prolonged socialturbulence. The cultural innovation, which entails the emancipation of the Chinese women, may be the reason for the introduction and translation of this novel that is on a woman and by a woman. The limited number of introductions of the author and the novel are found scattered in magazine articles and histories of the English literature.During the first three decades of the People's Republic of China, the rising fame of the novel can be illustrated by two facts. For one thing, the Lowood and the Gateshead chapters in Jane Eyre were adapted to two short texts in two of the English textbooks compiled by Chinese scholars. For the other, the novel was subjected to a pungent repudiation in 1958 in a sixty-page pamphlet written by four young teachers of the Department of Western Languages of Beijing University (JbXWi-&^). It is in the 1950s that the novel and its author suffered the most violent attacks from the Chinese critics, for the heroine was a "petty bourgeois intellectual woman," Rochester is a "landed gentry," and St. John Rivers, a servant, or the "pawn" of the English colonists. The labeling of the characters according to their "class status", the emphasis on the oppressions by bourgeois capitalists, the virtues of the proletariat, the felicities of life under socialism, and the furious accusation against all those go counter to the party line,...
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