Author：Xuefei Min

Abstract: Clarice Lispector has long been regarded as a writer preoccupied with introspective themes, yet her final work, A Hora da Estrela, marks a notable shift in her writing, emerging as her sole text which engages directly with social critique. This paper argues that such a literary turn does not merely stem from a late-life inclination toward memoir writing, nor does it represent an abrupt transformation. Rather, it synthesizes her lifelong conviction—rooted in her youth—of using literature to pursue justice with the thematic representation of “hunger” as both contemporary anxiety and national issue. In truth, the social critique in A Hora da Estrela does not dissolve the existentialist philosophical core that permeates Clarice’s oeuvre. Instead, it elevates a societal problem into a profound philosophical inquiry into the essence of human existence.

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies   3-13   Details

Author：Xiaorui Chu

Abstract: As a central figure in 20th-century Brazilian modernism, Mário de Andrade uses his literary works to explore the cultural tensions inherent in Brazil’s modernization. In Macunaíma, he draws on foreign mythological figures recorded by German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg to create an unconventional national hero marked by contradictions. By giving the hero a “non-national” character, Mário challenges the romanticization and symbolic appropriation of indigenous culture found in traditional nationalist allegories. At the same time, he subverts the dominant narrative frameworks through Macunaíma’s magical journey. ...

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies   14-27   Details

Author：Lin Ma

Abstract: In 1908, the first group of Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil. Over the following decades, they were accepted by Brazilian society due to their outstanding achievements in agriculture and were hailed as a model of immigrant integration. Japanese culture also permeated Brazilian daily life to some extent. On the surface, Japanese descendants in Brazil enjoy a high degree of social acceptance and recognition. However, this appearance conceals identity struggles faced by Japanese immigrants and their descendants. The novel Nihonjin by the Japanese-Brazilian writer Oscar Nakasato tells the story of a Japanese family’s journey in Brazil from the perspective of a third-generation immigrant....

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies   28-37   Details

Author：Xiaodong Xu

Abstract: Cruentation received official approval as solid judicial proof against potential murders throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The practical value of this strange custom is to make decision-making process externalized and efficacious as well. After being dramatized and represented both in family tragedies an...

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   38-58   Details

Author：Yifan Meng

Abstract: As one of the most significant contemporary novelists in British literature, Julian Barnes’s fictional works epitomize the historical turn in 1990s British fiction. His profound engagement with language, literature, and philosophy has fostered a heightened historical consciousness and acute sensitivity to litera...

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   59-68   Details

Author：Yi Liu

Abstract: As the most complex work in Günter Grass’ “Danzig Trilogy,” Hundejahre centers on the human history. The spatialization of time is staged on both a structural and thematic level. On the one hand, through the “strategy of simultaneity,” the temporal narrative is endowed with a spatial structure, where linear, unidirectional time loses its continuity and orientation. History, as a collective representation of the passage of time and imagined future trends, is embodied in the Vistula River. On the other hand, the scarecrows, dogs, and mines, recalled through the Vistula River, portray the eternal recurrence and absurdity of history. Humanity cannot make history; human history makes no progress. Humanity’s “self-domestication” ultimately leads to hell. Hundejahre reflects Grass’ historical perspective during the 1960s, while also questioning and critically reflecting on the concept of progress.

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   69-77   Details

Author：Zhaofang Cao

Abstract: The short story “María Concepción” by Katherine Anne Porter is centered around an indigenous Indian woman in the Mexican Revolution who denies her own tradition but believes in Catholicism. It refracts the purpose of national identity construction of American archaeological project in the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, as well as the complex colonial relationships in Mexico. The female protagonist, María Concepción, though of Native American descent, tries to become an “inheritor” of white civilization. However, she can never be fully accepted into the white system and thus becomes merely a “substitute” for “civilization.” While Porter critiques the cultural colonial project of American imperialism, she cannot escape the influence of the hierarchy of civilizations. Her writings of Indian civilization ultimately succumb to the trope of “primitivism.”

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   78-87   Details

Author：Ottmar Ette

Abstract: Goethe’s term “Weltliteratur” (World Litrature) has served, for a long time, as a central guideline for Comparative Literature. His much-discussed statement of January 31, 1827, however, is based upon a specific temporality conceived as epochal, i.e. including a clear beginning as well as a clear end. This article discusses the ongoing rad...

Column：Comparative Literature Studies   88-94   Details

Author：Yixin Lu

Abstract: Since World WarⅡ, J. D. Salinger has incorporated elements of ancient Chinese thought into his work as a means of responding to and reflecting on the war and its postwar realities. He draws extensively on ideas conducive to spiritual exploration, with Chinese Zen Buddhism and Taoist philosophy exerting a particularly ...

Column：Comparative Literature Studies   95-106   Details

Author：Xi Xi

Abstract: Through the soul of the dead Willie Lincoln, George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo takes readers to the Bardo—an intermediate state between life and death when the soul is not connected to a body. The novel reflects the tough state of the American Civil War in contrast to the warmth of father-son relat...

Column：British Literature Studies   107-118   Details