Like foreign literary studies in China in general ,Bronte criticism went through two major stages during the first sixty years of the PRC .Studies done prior to 1978 were guided chiefly by politically motivated excess of attention to class struggle while those after appear less ideologically inflected .Western-style ,highly professional criticism of the Brontes, works ,however ,did not appear until the 1990s .These changes notwithstanding ,Chinese scholarship on the Brontes is consistently characterized by a preference for the novels at the expense of the poetry ,a preoccupation with major works ,and the relative lack of interest in Anne Bronte . Research on Charlotte Bronte during the 1949 1978 period focused primarily on her major novel , Jane Eyre ,whose love theme was treated by Chinese scholars as a form of class struggle .Hailed for its critical description of the″depravity″ of the wealthy ,the novel was blamed nevertheless for its failure to propose a viable alternative to capitalism .The value of criticism in the 1980s remained limited by the inertia of this mindset and by the superficiality of the analysis whenever it managed to escape it .Criticism after the 1990s branched into several larger trends ,which included character analysis ,especially that of Bertha Mason and her relation to Jane Eyre ,gender/class analysis ,archetypal criticism ,post-colonial studies and comparative studies .There was an increasingly perceptible attempt at originality among many critics although some ended up hunting for mere novelty .One handy example is an article that argues the androgynous nature of Jane Eyre ,which condition ,according to the critic ,allows her to achieve gender equality otherwise off limits to women .For the same reason ,Chinese critics may turn even more radical than liberal intellectuals in the West ,as in the contention that Jane,s elevated status is a questionable one built on the foundation of the imprisonment of Rochester,s Creole wife and slavery in the Caribbean,s . Not surprisingly ,many are critical of the novel,s ending ,which they believe to be a concession to Victorian ideology .Mainstream criticism ,nonetheless ,closely follows the lead of Western academia ,and is deeply influenced by the works of such critics as Riche ,Eagleton ,Gilbert and Gubar .Charlotte,s other works have received scant attention ,and often in a comparative context whenever they do . Much of what has been said about the scholarship on Charlotte Bronte applies to that of Emily Bronte .Studies on the latter,s works tend to focus on her only novel Wuthering Heights ,showing little interest in her no-less-valuable poetic output .As it is with her sister,s works ,political changes in China also produced a visible impact on Emily Bronte research ,as pre-1978 preoccupation with(class) revenge theme gave way to a diversity of interpretative approaches that blossomed in the 1990s and after .Socio- historical studies ,archetypal criticism ,narratological and comparative analyses represent the dominant interpretative approaches to this novel ,with the surprising near absence of attention to gender or psychological issues .For some ,the novel is a representation of the devastating effect of capitalism on rural economy ,hence a realist masterpiece ,while for others ,the apparent alienation and the twisted personality that fill its pages are the rudiments of a modernist work .Archetypal criticism of Wuthering Heights continues to be a popular approach ,nor are its common pitfalls avoided .Meanwhile ,the novel,s non-conventional narrative style has deservedly attracted considerable critical attention to this aspect of the novel ,as it does in the West although Chinese scholars sometimes see such narrative figures as Lockwood and Nelly in ways dissimilar to Western criticism .But what really sets Chinese critics apart from their Western colleagues in this field is the all but total absence of research done on the Romantic impulses that throb under the textual surface of this novel .Such indifference is apparently symptomatic of the age-old ideologically-based preference for realism in the Chinese academia . One last distinguishing feature of Chinese scholarship on the Brontes is the prominence of comparative and archetypal criticism ,approaches that allow insights into the novels hard to obtain from other perspectives .There remains ,however ,much room for the furtherance of such studies beyond the search for and demonstration of comparability .These articles have yet to show what critical end it may serve that one finds in Jane Eyre the Cinderella archetype or that the fall theme of Paradise Lost reappears in Wuthering Heights .Amid the rush to use modern critical theories ,a number of scholars continue to make interesting readings of these works from conventional approaches .