Author： Haoran Chen

Abstract: With her collection What the Earth Seemed to Say, the American poet Marie Howe was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The more than twenty newly included eco-themed poems in this volume mark a major shift in her creative trajectory. Departing from a lyric tradition that treats elements of nature as mere backdrop or imagery, Howe places the earth, animals, plants, and everyday objects on an equal footing with human beings, highlighting their irreducible strangeness and agency and thereby creating a lived landscape that is both intimately entangled and constantly tense. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s theory of “dark ecology,” this article focuses on the structures of co-presence—“you in me, ...

Column：Poetry and Poetics Studies   98-106   Details

Author：Juan Wang

Abstract: E. A. Robinson was an important poet of American Naturalism. His work not only expresses the despair of Naturalist thought but also conveys a spiritual strength that transcends despair. Through close readings of his representative poems, this article reexamines Robinson’s seemingly contradictory worldview, arguing that his poetry is structured around a thematic trajectory of “dislocation, alienation, and transcendence.” Caught between reality and ideal, self and society, his characters gradually descend into alienation, yet ultimately achieve a form of spiritual transcendence through their direct confrontation with suffering....

Column：Poetry and Poetics Studies   107-116   Details

Author：Shuang Zhang

Abstract: In The Newton Letter, contemporary Irish novelist John Banville employs irony as a narrative strategy to explore subjectivity, the efficacy of language, and temporal experience. Isaac Newton’s “letters,” as “a text within the text,” establish a parallel narrative structure that is continually being deconstructed. In the quest for Newton’s spirit of rationality, the narrator’s pursuit of self-realization instead falls into a cycle of irony. Irony is not merely a linguistic posture but an intrinsic structure of how human beings experience and perceive history. The work transforms ...

Column：Poetry and Poetics Studies   117-125   Details

Author：Xiaoping Zhang

Abstract: Outer Dark, one of the postmodern Southern novels by Cormac McCarthy, revisits and reinterprets the important literary motif of ethical aberration. While depicting its ugly manifestations, the novel also endows them with new implications. The abstractness of the novel’s setting and characterization, its rewriting and parody of religious archetype, and its employment of double and the trope of doubleness not only endow McCarthy’s presentation of ethical aberration with a culturally inflected uniqueness of aesthetic ugliness, but also foreground the work with ...

Column：Literary Ethics and Aesthetic Studies   126-134   Details

Author：Shixian Liu

Abstract: Latest historical archives of the 18th-century Atlantic world reveal that the aesthetics of the sublime during the Enlightenment is deeply intertwined with the colonial networks of European empires. European democratic revolutions and overseas trade give rise to extreme exploitative practices including imperial colonial expansion and racial slavery. Against this historical backdrop, intellectual elites such as Burke and Kant redefine the concept of the sublime, embedding human transcendence within the aesthetic-political coding of the Enlightenment’s “Culture of Order.” Nevertheless, this alienated abstract “aesthetic consecration” embodies profound anxieties and compromises regarding regime shifts...

Column：Literary Ethics and Aesthetic Studies   135-145   Details

Author：Chengri Piao, Qianru Ding

Abstract: Within the intellectual context of Joseon Confucianism and the tradition of Neo-Confucian poetry, Yulgok Yi I’s Gosan Gugokga has often been regarded as a poetic articulation of the “joy of the benevolent” central to Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism. Existing scholarship has largely emphasized its continuity with Zhu Xi’s legacy, with less attention paid to how the “joy of the benevolent” is generatively enacted through poetic structure and aesthetic practice. This study situates Gosan Gugokga within the contexts of Confucian ethics of benevolence and Neo-Confucianism, and systematically investigates the poem’s articulation of the “joy of the benevolent.” It proposes an internal progressive structure: “shared joy-joy in following principle-joy in propagating the Way.” Yulgok does not confine the “joy of the benevolent” to an inner state attained ...

Column：Literary Ethics and Aesthetic Studies   146-156   Details