Author： Yiwei Liu, Jingyu Chen

Abstract: Known as “an ecological elegy,” The Echo Maker demonstrates an intention to examine numerous ethical issues such as the relationships between humans and their own rationality, between human and nature, and between human and time through an ecological lens. Its ethical concerns far exceed what current scholarship commonly frames as ecological ethics. Centering on two core images—the sandhill crane and the Capgras syndrome, the novel reveals the significance of irrational factors such as emotions in maintaining the wholeness of rationality, revisits the tension between nature and modern civilization, and underscores the need to overcome synchronic and diachronic fractures of modernity so as to reconstitute historical continuity. In doing so, it opens the possibility of restoring modern...

Column：Literary Ethics and Socio-Political Criticism   99-108   Details

Author：Jingbo Zhang, Yue Lu,

Abstract: Through its narrative of gangster illegality, The Great Gatsby reveals the symbiotic interplay of legal and criminal orders in America during the Jazz Age. The novel demonstrates this through a triple mechanism of “space-character-violence”: the parties and cars create “extralegal spaces” that blur the line between legality and illegality; the power triangle between Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy reflects the deep texture of class stratification and capital collusion; and Gatsby’s tragic death as a “scapegoat” reveals the underlying logic by which the capital system secures legitimacy through violence. In this approach, the novel engages in a thorough critique of the ideological illusion that underpins the American Dream. Fitzgerald’s sophisticated literary writing transforms the logic of gangster capitalism into...

Column：Literary Ethics and Socio-Political Criticism   107-114   Details

Author：Tian Liu

Abstract: George Brant’s political drama Grounded centers on the wartime experience of a female drone operator, revealing the complex entanglement of technological rationality, gender order, and state power in the post-9/11 context. By rendering warfare remote and interface-mediated, drone operations erode the situational foundations of traditional war ethics, transforming violence from embodied confrontation into a decontextualized technological procedure. Within this system, technological rationality operates in tandem with patriarchal discipline to suppress women’s bodily experience and affective perception, leaving the ethical subject in a state of suspension. The play’s feminized imagery—most notably the “Gorgon Eyes”—exposes the aesthetic mechanisms that mask technological violence while

Column：Literary Ethics and Socio-Political Criticism   115-123   Details

Author：Minyue Shi, Lijuan Zhu,

Abstract: In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Das Fräulein von Scuderi, the conflict between art and reality, alongside the opposition between the court of reason and the court of morality, constitutes the central theme of the Aesthetics of Mediation. Through the story of the 17th-century French writer Mademoiselle de Scudéri, Hoffmann dramatizes the dilemma arising from the binary opposition between art and morality, as well as the complexities inherent in judicial judgment. Ultimately, he achieves a limited reconciliation between art and reality through the Aesthetics of Mediation. The novella’s engagement with the contemporary tension between artists and society reflects Hoffmann’s profound concern with aesthetic predicaments. Furthermore, his practical application of Aesthetics of Mediation, coupled ...

Column：Literary Aesthetics and Cultural Representation   124-132   Details

Author：Jiexin Yi, Shuqi Tian,

Abstract: In The Golden Christmas, set against the backdrop of antebellum Southern plantations, Simms’s food writing serves as a key to decoding his ideology of community. Food choices and preferences of the main characters reflect the cultural exclusivity in the early phase of the construction of Southern nationalism, constituting a literary reproduction of provincialism and posing significant obstacles to community building. Meanwhile, food sharing at Christmas feasts evokes a sense of community and fosters reconciliation through concrete enjoyment. In the context of 19th-century racial politics, food is also intertwined with Simms’s ideas of slavery, alienated into an ideological tool to whitewash the exploitative order of the plantation and maintain the racial hierarchy of the Southern community.

Column：Literary Aesthetics and Cultural Representation   133-142   Details

Author：Shouyi Luo

Abstract: In “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell highly regarded Henry Miller’s controversial novel Tropic of Cancer as a non-political and non-moral endorsement of quietism. The essay therefore was widely accepted as a proof of Orwell’s depression and despair. However, this acceptance was over-simplistic and clouded Orwell’s literary view elucidated in the text. He appreciated Miller’s courage to identify with the common man, and despite misinterpretations, the faith of the common man remained the foundation of all Orwell’s literary emotions and attitudes. Amid the torrent of leftist propaganda, Miller swung the pendulum of art in the opposite direction. This non-political stance formed a counterbalance, functioning as a pivotal weight for Orwell to uphold a middle-ground position when the...

Column：Literary Aesthetics and Cultural Representation   143-152   Details

Author：Qingfen Meng

Abstract: Urban writing is a cutting-edge topic in foreign literature research. Professor Yang Jincai’s Approaching the Features of Urbanization in 21st-Century American Fiction is the first monograph in China to systematically and deeply explore urban writing in American fiction of this century. This work centers on the representation of urbanization, examining urban spaces, social landscapes, and cultural scenery in the works of important American writers, exploring the development and evolution of towns and cities, as well as the multiple crises and possible way out of urban residents, and looking forward to the future of human civilization. The book is ambitious in its conception, broad in its vision, rigorous in its chapters, and full of original ideas, forming a research paradigm that integrates grand...

Column：Book Review   153-156   Details