Author：Wei Ruan

Abstract: Roughly beginning in the first century, major civilizations started to expand beyond their places of birth. When settling down in a new land, people are committed to a specific religion and related institutions and customs. This can be described as “civilizational propagation.” In fact, this phenomenon can be seen as a kind of early regional globa...

Column：Culture Studies   001-009   Details

Author：Yu Liu

Abstract: When the novel represents an event, its aim is to represent aesthetic concepts with historical responsibility rather than the historical truth or the event per se. In the novel, the representation of the event is, very often, permeated with historical facts with the help of novel forms. This article attempts to define the trauma novel as a...

Column：Culture Studies   010-019   Details

Author：Wenyu Xie

Abstract: In the mid 1960s, the Hollywood, known as a dreaming factory, began to favor the baby boom generation born after World WarⅡand produced a number of well-known movies reflecting American youth culture in 1960s. Keen enough to capture the increasingly aggressive and combative mood among American youth, Bonnie and Clyde focused on...

Column：Culture Studies   020-030   Details

Author：Wenhui Si

Abstract: This paper studies the literary thought of Roland Barthes from the semiotic perspective and finds it mainly consists of his views about “writing” “narration” “text” and “author” and changes from the earlier structuralist studies to the later post-structuralism ones. Through the in-depth study of the academic relationships between his literary thought and his semiotic studies, this paper aims to reveal the semiotic characteristics of Barthes’s literary thought and discover its path of development.

Column：Culture Studies   031-037   Details

Author：Xiu Yan

Abstract: Nostalgia is one of the universal sensibilities. Both the Japanese poets of Man'yōshū and the Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty created nostalgic poems rich with images. The former focus on natural landscape, meteorological phenomena, animals and plants; the latter pre...

Column：Culture Studies   038-047   Details

Author：Shidan Chen

Abstract: The essay uses the Sphinx Factor in the theories of ethical literary criticism to explain the literary phenomena represented in Welcome to Hard Times （1960）, an allegorical novel by E. L. Doctorow, the American contemporary novelist. Analyzing this postmodernist novel reveals the essence of human beings in whom good and evil coexist a...

Column：British and American Literature Studies   048-056   Details

Author：Yunfeng Fei

Abstract: The unreliability of Lolita has long been under dispute. According to Booth, who proposed the concept of the unreliable narrator, the authorial judgment was obscured due to the endowment of full and unlimited narrative strategies to the unreliable narrator by the author. Phelan, based on the effects of the unreliable narration on the authorial reader, coined the new concept of bonding unreliability, and concluded that the dispute over the ethics of Lolita was the result of the subtle and blended use of estranging unreliability and bonding unreliability by the author. There is, in effect, a distinctive feature of duality in both the identity of the narrator and the plot form of the novel that dramatically adjusts the moral and emotional distances between the unreliable narrator and the reader.

Column：British and American Literature Studies   057-063   Details

Author：Jin Liu

Abstract: Wynnere and Wastoure is an important Middle English alliterative dream debate poem that has passed down in only one manuscript. Starting from inspecting two different emendations of one poetic line in the Prologue, this essay asserts that, as a minstrel-poet, or a “maker of myrthes,” the narrator of the debate poem, in composing for a courtly audience, finds himself in a dilemma where he both has to entertain as the audience expects and to teach out of his respect for his own profession, which accounts for the many subterfuges and indirection in the text.

Column：British and American Literature Studies   064-074   Details

Author：Li Liu

Abstract: Robert Browning establishes himself as the great dramatic monologue poet with the dramatic nature of his monologues. He inherits the subjectivity of Romantic lyrics, devoting himself to psychological explorations, while at the same time rebels against its monologic nature by presenting a split personality in...

Column：British and American Literature Studies   075-084   Details

Author：Ruofei Ma, Fangben Zeng

Abstract: D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano” is mainly studied through the perspectives of traditional modes of literary criticism. Originating from Gestalt psychology, the figure-ground theory of cognitive poetics is an effective means to the analysis of meaning generation. With the help of this theory, this paper expounds the thematic meaning generation in “Piano” and enables the readers to have a new aesthetic experience.

Column：British and American Literature Studies   085-091   Details