Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, there formed two theoretical camps in the circles of literary criticism: the camp of pro-commentary and that of anti-commentary. Based on the research of the compilation of Siku quanshu and evaluation on commentary works, this essay aims to explore the ambiguous attitude of the Qing authorities towards the study of commentary, and then further study the reasons, cultural connotations and the academic influences of this finding.

Law is an important category in the ancient Chinese literary formal criticism, and it reflects the ancient masters’ thoughts about nature and universe and gets enriched and extended as time passes by. Even though law is more basic and concrete than images and emotions, it plays such a crucial role in writing that it becomes a prototypical category. The meanings and implications of law become salient when it is put into the social condition of ancient China, on which the ancient Chinese literary criticism is based. Hence, law is not only a technique in writing, but also a historic concept with both natural quality and social quality. The former is based on the order of heaven, earth and nature while the latter on rituals. Law comes from dao 道 and depends on li 理; it is revealed in Style and embodied in Case. It is closely related to literary principles and helps to highlight the native characteristics of traditional Chinese literary criticism.

By tracing the development of literary studies in the 20th century, this article distinguishes “Theory of Literature” (or “Literary Theory”), “Theory” and “Post-theory” by their distinctive attributions in varied historical and cultural contexts, and then further demonstrates their theoretical paradigms, namely, the modern paradigm of formalism, the post-modern paradigm of French Theory, and the post-theory paradigm after theory. The author argues that the “literary theory” was formed in the framework of modern humanities, emphasizing the linguistic and aesthetic aspects of literary studies, and therefore it was actually a product of modern disciplinary differentiation and specialization. As for “Theory”, it emerged in the context of human sciences and was beyond the boundaries of the literary studies. With “Politics of Theory” as its core, it gave rise to a “grand theory”. Compared with them, “post-theory” seems even more complicated. Through the theoretical development of the two former phases, it is characterized by both reflexivity and multiplicity.

Researchers disagree on the values and status of literary criticism in the Tang dynasty. Therefore, there have been demands this issue to be explored in greater depth and comprehensively analyzed. Poetics in the Tang dynasty was characterized by a process of “standardization” that witnessed a change in focus from “what to write” to “how to write”.

Categories of painting had a special role and significance in criticism of the ci poetry. The mutual borrowing and the mutual facilitating among the different branches of arts are the common phenomena in the history. In ancient times it was common for critics to talk about works of one kind of art in terms of the theory of another kind. In their discussion of ci poetry, the critics borrowed much from the theory of painting, including such categories as shenpin (the magical work), nanbeizong (the northern and southern schools), goule (outlining) and shese (coloring). They drew on these to convey in a subtle and graphic manner what would otherwise have been hard to put into words. Such reference to painting in ci poetry criticism is a fascinating part of critical theory in ancient China; it deepened the content of poetics with regard to the ci and played an important role in its theoretical development.

In the Middle & Late Tang Dynasty, the capricious political situations and worsening struggles among the political groups drove the literati to escape from politics into hutian X鯵)?a kind of landscape architecture built as a miniature of arcadia and an epitome of universe where they lived a carefree retired life without quitting their official positions. Compared with their Middle Tang Dynasty precursors, those Late Tang Dynasty literati felt it more difficult to maintain a balance between official career and reclusive life, and found themselves deep in a dilemma. They described elaborately their imagination or construct of a hutian-like garden in their writings, which shows an important change in the literati ethos that resulted from political marginalization of the whole literati class and the their new aesthetic taste.

Being in accord with the great transformation of modern Chinese literature, modern Chinese literary theory is formed against the backdrop of changing modern cultural values in modern China. The multi-roles it has played in modern Chinese society include cultural intervention, social act, and construction of anesthetic experience and literary appreciation. It thus, through a dynamic dialogue between authoritative Western literary theory and traditional Chinese literary theory, manifests distinct features of modernity: vernacular written language, academic institutionalization, cultural explicitness, revolutionary radicalness, Westernization of inner system, and implicit Chinese traditions. It also has developed to a new stage where the localization of Western literary theory in China needs to be constructed and addressed.

The paper explores the question of the Chinese language epic, a topic frequently discussed in academic circles throughout the 20th century. Over the past century, many academics of an older generation have put forward ideas for resolving this issue, which arose from the perspective of the origins of Western literature. But careful examination indicates that all the hypotheses and explanations do not faithfully or fully adhere to the facts themselves. This academic affair arose in the course of eastward spread of Western influences when numerous scholars tried to explain the origins of Chinese literature by transplanting to Chinese soil a model of the origins of Western literature. The author doubts the logic of taking such a model as a universal interpretative framework for the historical development of literature or using epic poetry to explain the sources of Chinese literature. Underlying the fact that their academic consciousness was not based on a profound understanding of the facts and materials was a blind and unreflective pursuit of Western discourse; there are lessons to be learned from this.

The term kepan y裄$ means to divide a text into chapters and paragraphs. By explicating the context of Buddhist kepan and its influence on the explanation of Confucian classics, this paper tries to demonstrate how wide and profound this influence was on literary criticism in three aspects: literary criticism, fluency and coherence of writing, and relationships between the authors of literary theories and Buddhism in the early Tang Dynasty.

Many Chinese writers deem Shanghai of the early 20^th century as the most westernized and the most modern city in China, while in the imagination of their Western counterparts Shanghai is still oriental, primitive, barbarous and uncivilized. Despite such an irreconcilable difference, one point shared by those writers, both at home and abroad, is that Shanghai is a chaotic and unrestrained wilderness in terms of morals, which is closely related to the imagined image of an alien land and in conformity with the heterogeneity of both Chinese and Western cultures. This unique feature of Shanghai has become a dominant factor shaping the perception of writers from different backgrounds.

Going through the evolution of the body of stories about Lü Dongbin’s slaying the Yellow Dragon with a flying sword from a perspective combining the history of religion and the history of literature, this paper suggests that those stories are religious myths constructed during the prolonged rivalry between Buddhism and Taoism, and that they reflect not only the inherent conflict between the Zen theory of mind and spiritual nature (xinxing) and the theory of the integrated cultivation of spiritual nature and bodily life (xingming shuangxiu) of the interior elixir  (neidan) school of Taoism, but also the changes in Taoist theory of alchemy and in the discourse of Buddhism and Taoism. For Taoism, the meaning of the story eventually changed from cultivation in seclusion (qingxiu) to cooperative cultivation between men and women with sexual intercourse (nannü shuangxiu), and the meaning was gradually secularized as the religious backdrop of the story faded. Meanwhile, such conflict and changes not only furnished basic themes and materials for literature, but, more importantly, provided literature with means of expression, figures of speech, and power of literary construction.

This article revisits the history of canon formation in modern Chinese literary study and explores the complexities and quandaries of literary historiography as evidenced in the case of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 张爱玲). Chang’s change of fortune from counter-canon to hypercanon addresses not simply the aesthetic imperatives of textual production and critical evaluation, but also the contingencies and vicissitudes of literary criticism and the periodic self-refashioning of critical concepts and values. Simultaneously operating as text and myth, the spectacular “Eileen Chang phenomenon” compels us to confront the intertwined issues of canon, discipline, and pedagogy.

This essay, from four aspects of initiation study, author study, textual study and drama study, attempts to make a comprehensive, systematic and concise survey of the enormous research on Sartre and his existentialist literature done in China from the new period to the new century. Meanwhile, it also makes an objective analysis of the problems arising in the studying process, and offers constructive suggestions for future studies.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland first translated into Chinese by Zhao Yuanren was published in 1922. As an advocator of the New Literature Movement, Zhao chose to translate the famous fantastic novel in vernacular Chinese, which was virtually a linguistic experiment for the New Literature. He fulfilled the seemingly impossible mission and his version has been most popular till now. While the taste of Nonsense Literature which Zhao favored in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was ignored or changed in its two Chinese imitators: Shen Congwen’s Alice’s Adventures in China in 1928 and Chen Bochui’s Ms. Alice in 1931.

Based on historical documents concerning reprinted or illustrated editions of Ming-Qing popular fictions and the sequels to some of them, this article presents a study of the widespread use of typographic and lithographic printing in Shanghai between 1874 and 1911 and the dissemination of Ming-Qing popular fictions. The advent and widespread use of typographic and lithographic printing had both positive and negative effects on the dissemination of Ming-Qing popular fictions, which finalized the transformation of Chinese fiction written in the colloquial style from traditional popular fiction to new fiction or modern fiction in the late Qing period.

This essay traces a modernist aspect of Zhao Shuli’s fiction to his popular story “Rhymes of Li Youcai.” By using an analogy of flaneur from French resources, the essays argues that the major hero’s action delineated as a constant loitering suggests a special mode of intellectual being in his relation to the social and political life he lives in, which is quite exceptional in modern Chinese literature. Moreover, a close reading raises a few theoretical questions about the nature of his storytelling art and invites a rethinking of the relationship between the May Fourth Enlightenment Literature and the Revolutionary Literature. Keywords Zhao

This paper is an attempt to investigate how Lu Ji and Liu Xie develop their theories of literary creation on the foundation of the early philosophical discourse on language and reality. The first part of the paper examines various key terms, concepts, and paradigms developed in the philosophical discourse. The second part pursues a close reading of Lu’s and Liu’s texts to demonstrate how ingeniously they adapt and integrate those terms, concepts, and paradigms to accomplish two important tasks: to establish a broad framework for conceptualizing literary creation and to differentiate the complex mental and linguistic endeavors at different stages of the creative process. The paper ends with some general reflections on the impact of the two essays on the subsequent development of Chinese literary and aesthetic thoughts.

Among 20th century German writers, Brecht was the most actively interested in the research and adaptation of Chinese culture. Via a series of comparisons, this article reveals that his play The Good Person of Sichuan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan) was in fact based on the Yuan poetic drama A Sister Courtesan Comes to the Rescue (Zhao Pan’er fengyue jiu fengchen 赵盼儿风月救风尘) by Guan Hanqing 关汉卿; in terms of composition and characterization, the work is related to Mengzi’s 孟子 (Mencius) theory of “the tendency of human nature to do good” (xing shan shuo 性善说) as well. This article looks closely at the lessons Brecht drew from the Chinese dramatic arts, and how he applied that knowledge in the creation of epic theater and in the transformation of traditional Western aesthetics. The article explains how the infusion of classical Chinese wisdom, in combination with Brecht’s literary talent, gave added philosophic depth to The Good Person of Sichuan.

The image of an “audible China” is one opposed to the traditional China’s as “voiceless.” Not only does it refer to the survival of modern Chinese out of the abandoned Classical Chinese, it also provides a new means to examine modern China’s cultural transformation and development in terms of “voice.” This essay will discuss mainly how speech, one of “the three best tools for spreading civilization,” together with newspapers and magazines and schools, contributes to the success of the Vernacular Chinese Movement (Baihuawen yundong 白话文运动, CE 1917–1919) and the innovation in modern Chinese writing (including Chinese academic writing style).

The New Literature (xin wenxue 新文学), can be dated to modern China of the 19th century, when missionaries from the West wrote their own poems, essays and stories in a sort of European-styled vernacular Chinese known as the ouhua baihua 欧化白话 (Europeanized vernacular written language), different from the gu baihua 古白话 (“old” or antique vernacular). Western missionaries were part of the language modernization campaigns during the Late Qing and the May Fourth Movement (1919). They also participated in the New Fiction (xin xiaoshuo 新小说) and National Salvation by Literature (wenxue jiuguo lun 文学救国论) movements and exerted considerable influence upon modern Chinese literature. Their contribution used to be ignored or underestimated by a restricted perspective of inquiry, which should have been corrected by now.

This paper discusses the so-called “crisis” and “death” of comparative literature as a discipline, arguing that the congenital deficiency and internal illogicality are the root causes that make comparative literature lose the disciplinary consciousness in its growth. The theoretical turn, great emergence of cultural studies and the flooding of deconstructive torrent within the past thirty years are the external causes that lead the discipline into “crisis” and “death.” The paper asserts that despite its crises, comparative literature is not dying, but growing rapidly. The paper suggests that only by effectively constructing its disciplinary theory can Chinese comparative literature possibly strive to be the representative of the discipline in its third stage after French and American schools.

The eight-legged essay was the dominant portion of the imperial examinations in the Qing Dynasty (Qing Chao ng CE 1644–1911). However, the study on the evaluative standards for the eight-legged essay is often neglected and insufficiently discussed. Based on an investigation of A Complete Collection of Vermillion Examination Essays in the Qing Dynasty, the author of this paper proposes that the four aspects of purity, truthfulness, refinement and appropriateness  constitute the overall requirements of the examination essay and the four elements of principle, rules, diction and qi  form the operating standards of the examiners in grading the ranks and quality of the eight-legged essay.

The introduction of advanced printing technology from the West and the fiction revolution  accelerated fiction writing and printing into the modern mode. The book markets quickly expanded and the proportion of fiction publications solidly grew, which all led to a fiercer competition for the reading market. During this transition, the price of fictional literature fluctuated and was stabilized only through the fierce competition as well as the supervision from the mass media.

In the 20th century, the most frequently used critical term in Li Bai studies is “romanticism.” Li Bai is regarded as a romantic poet and his poetry is typical of romantic writing. But nowadays, the usage of these terms has been under attack. It is considered to be alien to the nature of classical Chinese literature. The most influential volume of Chinese literary history edited by Yuan Xingpei, which is published seven years ago, pays little attention to this term in the chapter on Li Bai. Are Western critical ideas really inappropriate in understanding Chinese classical literature? Can we imagine a wholly purified criticism that depends only on native Chinese critical terms without any Western impact? As modern readers, how can we understand our literary past? These questions have been under discussion for a long time ever since the modernity of Chinese literary criticism has become a major topic in modern literary studies. Reconsidering the establishment and spread of the concept “romanticism” in the study of Li Bai, will offer us some good answers to those questions.

As one of the greatest writers in ancient China, Tu Fu has exerted immense influence upon subsequent poets, including those living in the modern era. Combining history and text with theory, this essay intends to make an in-depth exploration of the rewriting of Tu Fu by Feng Zhi, Yang Mu, Xi Chuan, and Liu Waitong. First, I contextualize the selected four poems composed in 1941, 1974, 1989, and 2000, respectively; and then do a close reading of them. By doing so, this essay aims to observe the tensions between historical narrative and literary imagination, and between symbolic metaphor and living world, so as, ultimately, to interpret how the factors of aesthetics, politics, and metaphysics shaped the different images of Tu Fu.

The ideological trend of counter-West centralism  is becoming more and more obvious in the academic circle of Chinese literary theory from the 1980s to the beginning of this century. This article regards a certain number of phenomena as surveying targets, and analyzes that this ideological trend is embodied not only in evident purposes, slogans and views, but also in the re-thinking of education history and in the work of literary material and the reestablishing of criticism history. This article holds that the combination of two kinds of opposed learning trends for study and application respectively would be helpful in breaking through the barriers of single-sided logic, emphasizing native literary tradition, participating in contemporary literature practice and defining Chinese literary theory in the 21st century.

This paper intends to explore the influences of Borges on contemporary Chinese avant-garde writing in three aspects, namely, the recurrence and cyclical nature of time, the narrative labyrinth, and metafiction. The recurrence and cyclical nature of time avant-garde writers emphasize on constituting a self-contained circular structure, while the design of a labyrinth unfolds the chaos, obscurity, and indeterminacy of the world. Metafiction undermines the authenticity of traditional novels by exposing the fictitious nature of fictions.

Bertolt Brecht was one of the most famous and one the most controversial dramatists of the 20th century. Brecht, who had great influence on the development of drama in China in the New Period (the period after the end of the Cultural Revolution), also brought many problems. Those problems also made different people in Chinese theatrical circles have different opinions of Brecht. Some scholars think that the introduction of Brecht’s plays in the New Period was “a historical mistake”. Some even doubt if Brecht’s theory met artistic law, or if Brecht’s plays are of value. Why was Brecht so popular in the Chinese theatrical circles in the New Period? What does Brecht mean to Chinese drama? Why was Brecht misread in China? Did Chinese drama really need Brecht? This article offers serious reflections and analysis of those questions.