Author：Shuting Lv

Abstract: Nicolaus Avancini’s play Pietas victrix dramatizes the Christian emperor Constantine’s victory over the pagan usurper Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. It formulaically employs early modern just war discourse to stage the justice of Constantine’s cause, his legitimate authority, and his conduct in battle, thereby foregrounding his virtues as a just and merciful ruler. The play, however, selectively adapts this framework by elevating religious piety as the ultimate justification for war. This reframing thus functions not only to glorify the attending Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and his house, but also to provide both legal justification and political propaganda for the ongoing Habsburg campaigns against the Ottoman Empire.

Column：German Literature Studies   51-61   Details

Author：Yiling Duan

Abstract: The expansion of European colonial activities in the eighteenth century brought India into the sphere of European attention. Within this historical context, Goethe’s perspective extended eastward, and India became part of his spiritual journey to the East. The two poems Goethe composed based on Indian materials, “Der Gott und die Bajadere” and “Paria-Trilogie,” embody a fusion of Eastern and Western civilizations. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting these materials, Goethe approached Indian elements dialectically. He preserved the exotic qualities of these elements while integrating European religious elements, thus elaborating on his perspectives on human nature and society. Through...

Column：German Literature Studies   62-73   Details

Author：Yongjian Zhao, Mei Yu

Abstract: Documentary writing has emerged as a significant cultural phenomenon in contemporary British drama. Over the past three decades since the mid-1990s, documentary plays have been widely staged in theatres of varying scales across Britain, while documentary techniques have been increasingly adopted and adapted within the British theatrical landscape. These developments suggest that contemporary British drama has undergone a discernible documentary turn. This article first investigates why such a turn has taken place by situating it within its political, social, and cultural contexts. It then examines how the documentary turn has been realized, focusing on two key dimensions: thematic...

Column：Literature Studies   74-84   Details

Author：Xiaoyan Liu

Abstract: Anxiety writing serves as a central framework for understanding John Berryman’s confessional poetry, where it manifests in three interrelated forms—realistic, neurotic, and moral. Realistic anxiety arises from traumatic memory and threats posed by the external world. Neurotic anxiety exposes deep-seated distortions of inner desire and the death drive. Moral anxiety foregrounds the subject’s spiritual struggle within guilt and ethical self-reproach. As these forms of anxiety overlap and coexist, Berryman develops a complex poetic practice that moves beyond a simple opposition between “anxiety” and “redemption.” Through polyphonic subjectivity, black humor, fragmented structures, and...

Column：Literature Studies   85-95   Details

Author：Jinmei Zhang

Abstract: As the concluding volume of J. M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy, Summertime further demonstrates the author’s sustained reflection on autobiographical writing. Through the deployment of multiple narrative voices and modes, Coetzee deliberately positions the authorial self as an Other, thereby blurring the boundaries between fictional narrative and biographical fact. In contrast to the previous two volumes of his trilogy, Summertime employs a fragmented narrative structure to dismantle the presumed coherence and sameness of personal identity, while its strategy of narrative othering poses a fundamental challenge to conventional autobiographical discourse....

Column：Literature Studies   96-104   Details

Author：Jian Huang, Jingyi Zhang

Abstract: Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot takes the protagonist’s return home as its central narrative trajectory, tracing the search for identity experienced by colored individuals under South Africa’s apartheid system. After transgressing imposed racial and social boundaries, the protagonist becomes entangled in a profound crisis of identity and an acute ethical dilemma. This predicament arises from the apartheid regime’s disruption of familial relations and foregrounds the intense conflict between kinship-based ethics and racially constructed moral codes. The protagonist’s final decision to return home thus constitutes a critical ethical choice through which he reconsiders his dual ethical identities, revealing the...

Column：Literature Studies   105-114   Details

Author：Tongxin Cheng

Abstract: Afrofuturist conceptions of heroism depart from traditional heroic paradigms centered on world-saving missions and self-sacrifice, instead foregrounding how Black subjects persist and survive under conditions of structural racial oppression. In The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead articulates this survival-oriented model of heroism by juxtaposing the life trajectories of two Black adolescents, Elwood and Turner. Elwood remains committed to moral idealism and nonviolent resistance, yet ultimately meets his death at the hands of institutionalized violence. Turner, by contrast, survives through silence, endurance, and strategic withdrawal. The stark contrast between their fates calls into question the...

Column：Literature Studies   115-124   Details

Author：Tingting Chen

Abstract: The figure of "Andréide" in the late-19th century French science fiction novel L'Ève future represents a pivotal moment in the conceptual genealogy of the "Mechanical Beauty," profoundly shaping subsequent narratives of Human-Android romance in science-fiction literature and media. Tracing the conceptual evolution of the "Mechanical Beauty" from its early origins to contemporary interpretations reveals that the philosophical connotations embedded in the "Andréide" have been partially misinterpreted during its reception. This has led to the reconstitution of the "Mechanical Beauty" in recent works into three dominant types: the "perfect lover," the "emotional laborer," and the "reified object," each deviating from its original conceptual design....

Column：Cultural Studies   125-135   Details

Author：Xue Yu

Abstract: Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, including Commonplace Book and Historical Criticism Notebook, serve as crucial paratextual materials that provide essential evidence for tracing the formation of his thought. These notebooks reveal Wilde’s particular engagement with Plato’s theory of Methexis of Beauty in the Symposium, as well as Aristotle’s discussion in Nicomachean Ethics concerning the “Megalopsychia,” which asserts that aesthetic judgment should remain autonomous from utilitarian considerations. These notes demonstrate a significant genealogical connection with his doctrine of Aestheticism. This investigation, by adopting the theoretical framework of Classical Reception Studies ...

Column：Cultural Studies   136-146   Details

Author：Xiaodong Guo

Abstract: Alenka Zupančič is a distinguished contemporary Lacanian philosopher and Nietzsche scholar. According to Zupančič, under the influence of two “nihilisms,” Nietzsche’s assertion of “the Death of God” connotates twofold meanings: the eclipse of value integrated into “one” and then, the existence of two Gods: the Symbolic God as law and the Real God as exception. Two Gods function in the same way as Lacan’s “Master Discourse,” that is, the symbolic order is reintegrated through the change of the master signifier, and some unknowable law of the Real emerges simultaneously and secretly in the form of a symptom. Through the psychoanalytic deconstruction and reconstruction of the cognitive connotation, logical motivation and framework operation of Nietzsche’s “Death of God,” Zupančič completes the articulation between Lacan and Nietzsche at the cultural level.

Column：Cultural Studies   147-156   Details