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

Author：Mengdie Xu

Abstract: Contemporary Irish writer Sebastian Barry addresses the overlooked trauma of non-nationalists during the Irish War of Independence through his writings The Steward of Christendom and The Secret Scripture, focusing on the core space of “madhouse.” According to Michel Foucault’s theory, the...

Column：British Literature Studies   119-129   Details

Author：Yufan Xin

Abstract: The writing of the war memory in the collection Futenmayo and the novel Cocktail Party by Oshiro Tatsuhiro can be regarded as a true portrayal of a side of the post-war Okinawa spiritual history. The excessive quantification of the dead in Japan triggered a rethink of war memory, and Oshiro was devoted to writing the “plural of m...

Column：Literatures of East and Southeast Asia   130-141   Details

Author：Ngô Viết Hoàn

Abstract: In the process of modern Vietnamese literary history, realist literature and the tendency toward realistic writing have played an important historical role. As a vital component of Vietnamese revolutionary literature, it not only shows the lively reality in Vietnam during the anti-colonial war, but also contributes many outstanding authors and literary theorists to its national literary scene. Using a historical and theoretical approach combined with the perspective of modern literary history, this paper systematically reviews the Vietnamese realist literary tendency through three aspects, namely, the emergence of realist literary tendencies in Vietnam, Lê Đình Kỵ’s literary ideas and the rise of the schools of realist literary creation in Vietnam, and Đỗ Đức Dục and the standardized development of Vietnamese realism. ...

Column：Literatures of East and Southeast Asia   142-156   Details