China and the West

Yuan, Kejia. Bailun he Bailun shi ying xiong [ID D26472].
Yuan schreibt über Byron's Childe Harold : "After the first six pages [of Canto I], as soon as Childe Harold enters Napoleon-occupied Spain, the author kicks out Childe Harold and steps forward. The listlessness, boredom of the young aristocrat a moment ago is replaced by the fiery enthusiasm of a democratic combatant. In the second canto, [Byron] censures the English plunder of the Greek relics, attacks religious superstition, eulogizes the Albanian fighters, and expresses his discontent with Greek submission to Turkish rule, he does this all by himselb. He does not even allow Childe Harold to get a work in edgeways."

Chu Chih-yu : Yuan applied a more eclectic approach, dividing Byronic rebellion in two aspects, the progressive and the passive. He observed that after the French Revolution, there appeared in Europe a wave of bourgois national and democratic revolutions. He considered these revolutions progressive and believed that the Byronic heroes' pursuit of individual freedom, dignity, happiness, and liberation coincided with the ideal of freedom and democracy which the democratic classes were striving for, and that, in terms of historical materialism, it was in keeping with the historical trend. The passive side of the Byronic hero to which he referred was mainly his melancholy and despair.
Yuan found two different kinds of rebellion in Childe Harold : Childe Harold's ennui and escapism and Byron's direct call to the oppressed people to drive out the invaders.
Ye Zi accused Yuan of 'objectively propagating bourgeois ideology'. Yuan replied : While obliged to admit that individualism was the core of bourgeois ideology. He insisted on the separability of bourgeois revolutionary thought from bourgeois individualism, especially in the case of Byron.
Luo Li criticized Yuan mainly out of political considerations. He wrote : "Comrade Yuan's refusal to acknowledge the bourgeois individualistic nature of Byron's works disminishes the line of demarcation between proletarian and bourgeois ideology, which is very harmful to the present struggle to promote proletarian ideology and eliminate bourgeois ideology."