Author：Weisheng Tang, Qi Ai

Abstract: The “material turn” represented by “flat ontology” holds that the thing has its own agency and is independent of human beings, and there is no ontological difference between them, so it requires human beings to imagine the being of things correctly. In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior, the author traces the protagonist Dellarobia’s evolving perception of the monarch butterflies’ extraordinary migration. From initially viewing it as “divine revelation” to gradually recognizing its intrinsic value and material agency, the narrative demonstrates her shift from anthropocentric perspective to non-anthropocentric one, ultimately forming an ecological perspective of equality with all things. This ...

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)   3-11   Details

Author：Ruoyi Huang, Mingwen Xiao

Abstract: After the American Civil War, the South underwent profound structural transformations, which were further accelerated by the Second World War. The traditional hierarchy came into conflict with the emergent democracy in terms of race, gender, and class, leading to identity dilemmas and subjectivity crises among Southerners. In Clock Without Hands, McCullers illustrates the historical changes and people’s identity performances through food narratives: Under the shadow of “the Southern family romance,” Malone clings to the old culture through anorexia and selective eating; the old Judge seeks solace in gluttony, while his identity is shattered by the impossibility of restoring the old order ...

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)   13-21   Details

Author：Heping Qi, Zeming Hu

Abstract: The 9/11 terrorist attack in the United States, an unexpected and urgent political event, can be taken as the hyperobject ontologically. In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the fractured sense of time experienced by Alzheimer’s disease patients reflects human’s failure of temporal perception, embodying the temporal undulation of the...

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)   22-31   Details

Author：Xiaohong Peng, Xiang Chen

Abstract: Tang Weisheng’s A Study on Narrative of Thingness is the first monograph that provides a theoretical framework for and concrete demonstration of the Thingness section within the Object-Oriented Narratology. It also offers new perspectives, concepts, frameworks, and methods for literary studies. It is a work that “awaits Chinese interpretation.” Its reflections possess the potential to reinterpret Chinese literary works and theory, while also presenting a Chinese approach to mutual learning among civilizations from a Narratological perspective.

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)   32-40   Details

Author：Qiuyu Li

Abstract: In his colonial fiction, Conrad constructs a Western community by uniting Westerners and excluding Asians and Africans through the writing of daily life. Although such a community contains discordant elements within itself, it remains relatively idealized compared to reality, reflecting Conrad’s conservative tendency on racial issues. Conrad had personally traveled to Africa and witnessed the greed and brutality of imperial colonization, yet he still portrayed in his works a Western community characterized more by warmth than by conflict. This reveals the...

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature   41-51   Details

Author： Rui Kong, Xinhua Xing

Abstract: The “Vaim trilogy,” recently published by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse who was laureated with the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, takes the Norwegian fishing village of Vaim as its shared narrative space and reflects the dilemmas of modernity through a mode of local narrative. As the first part of the trilogy published in 2025, Vaim depicts three interrelated predicaments faced by the modern individual in relation to society, others, and the self. First, the rupture between the individual and society is manifested in the alienation of the hometown and the experience of urban estrangement generated by the solidification of local spatial structures. Second, the impasse between the self and others...

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature   52-59   Details

Author：Yueling Ma

Abstract: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl stands not only as a canonical text of African American women’s literature but also as a politically charged work that lays bare the spatial logic of slavery’s domination. Reexamined through the new mobilities paradigm, slavery emerges as a paradoxical mechanism in which “coerced circulation” and “spatial confinement” operate in tandem, subjecting Black women to a racialized spatial order of surveillance and intrusion through the differential allocation of mobility. Brent’s seven-year concealment in the garret constitutes a resistance practice centered on strategic immobility, generating a form of “stillness-as-mobility” through architectural...

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature   60-68   Details

Author：Jingwen Xu

Abstract: Tree of Smoke, a Vietnam War novel by the contemporary American novelist Denis Johnson, is a representation of the Americans’ consideration of and longing for the innocent national identity after the Vietnam War. Firstly, the novel depicts the Americans’ loss of innocence in the Vietnam War, and the confusion after the deconstruction of the innocent national identity. Secondly, the Vietnamese, with their disclosure of the war as a colonial war, and their adherence to cultural uniqueness, are not the others contributing to the innocence myth, therefore destructing the cultural hierarchy between Americans and the non-whites in the myth. Thirdly, the novel casts doubt on whether the innocent national...

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature   69-78   Details

Author：Bixiao Bai

Abstract: In recent years, with the rise of Energy Humanities, oil narratives has emerged as a new subject in literary studies. This paper puts Faulkner’s four stories published between 1930 and 1940—“Fox Hunt,” “Carcassonne,” “Black Music,” and The Hamlet—under the framework of petroculture, and combines the social and historical cont...

Column：Literary Interdisciplinary Studies   79-88   Details

Author：Yizhen Hong

Abstract: As the concluding work of Toni Morrison’s “trilogy on the African American experience,” Paradise presents the historical memory and spiritual trauma of African Americans through rich auditory narratives. While existing scholarship has largely focused on spatial politics and female communities in the novel, the soundscape and its...

Column：Literary Interdisciplinary Studies   89-97   Details