ABSTRACT
By outlining Wordsworth’s reception in twentieth-century China, I draw attention to Chinese readers’ persistent comparison of Wordsworth with certain elements in traditional Chinese culture and questions such an anachronistic reading of Wordsworth. I examine how the New Culture Movement leaders appropriated Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) in their advocacy of the Chinese literary revolution, thereby proposing that “two Wordsworths” seemed to be present in China: one was the author of radical poetics and the other of traditionalist poetry. The coexistence of these two Wordsworths could explain why rivalling literary groups shared an interest in Wordsworth before 1949 and shed light on the drastic disfavour he fell into in Communist China. The reception history also reveals a consistent neglect of The Prelude, a tendency that was not redressed until the end of the twentieth century. I close the chapter by exploring the current state of Wordsworth criticism in China, an ambiguous state which is characterised by an obstinate comparative interest on the one hand and an anxiety to catch up with English scholarship on the other. The two Wordsworths in China attest to the irrevocable transformation of the original text after it is received in a foreign culture.
