A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Jane Austen's Novels in the Printing Market and Textbooks in China in 2021

Abstract

The Reception Theory argues that literary works are received against an existing horizon of expectations consisting of readers’ current knowledge and presuppositions about literature, and that the meanings of works change as such horizons shift. Based on the Reception Theory, this essay explores how Chinese ordinary readers and scholars view Jane Austen through the study of the reception of Jane Austen's Novels in the printing market and textbooks in China in 2021. This essay believes that on one hand, the sales of Jane Austen's books and editorial evaluations proves that Jane Austen is an unquestionable canonical writer in the eyes of ordinary Chinese readers and it is her ‘Englishness’ – the “alien” and “exotic” feature of her writing – that makes her widely praised among the Chinese reading public. On the other hand, the absence or insignificant literary status of Jane Austen in the literary textbooks shows that she is not much favored by literary historians and this has much to do with the sociopolitical contexts and ideological imperatives which affect the literary aesthetics and literary historians’ evaluation criteria.