Author：Jin Tian

Abstract: The paradox between Pamela and Shamela, as a classic issue, had given impetus to fervent criticism upon the Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Based on the performative theory of literature and following the interactive relationship between text and reader, this paper tries to explore the competing performative process and eff...

Column：Reinterpretation of Classic Texts   001-010   Details

Author：Lilin Chen

Abstract: As a representative of American romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe’s aesthetics has won him widespread praise as a genius, but what is barely known is that Poe’s aesthetics originated from the ancient Platonic tradition. Poe’s cosmological essay Eureka is the key to revealing the interconnection between him and the Platonic tradition. Since modern times, from Platonism there emerged two separated paths of rationalism and irrationalism. Poe’s aesthetic career is a process in which both paths coexist and the romantic surpasses the scientific. Eureka continues ...

Column：Reinterpretation of Classic Texts   011-021   Details

Author：Juexu Chen

Abstract: This paper examines the representation of sound in Heinrich von Kleist’s Novelle “The Beggar Woman of Locarno,” a work by the prominent German author around the year 1800, and explores the paradoxical experiences and the questioning of reality contained in the Novelle. The inexplicable recurrence of sounds in the Novelle seemingly embodies the will of the old woman, enacting a successful act of revenge on the Marquis. However, this sound, oscillating between clarity and ambiguity, reality and illusion, reflects a chaotic unpredictable world of ...

Column：Reinterpretation of Classic Texts   022-031   Details

Author：Weiqi Yi, Quan Yang

Abstract: North and South is a novel that describes the conditions of industrial society in the Victorian era and demonstrates the important role of sympathetic love in Elizabeth Gaskell’s community imagination. In the 19th century, Britain's industrialization and urbanization accelerated, and social transformation led to changes in the structure of feelings. The quiet and leisurely feelings of rural life in the past faded away, while cash nexus gradually became the commonsense of community members. As a result, the contradiction between labor and capital has ...

Column：Community in Literature   032-042   Details

Author：Yongling Zhu

Abstract: Nadine Gordimer engages in literary cartography to explore the relation between human and ecological holism in The Conservationist, mapping South African farm space, transportation network, and ecocommunity to delve into the roots of ecological crisis and potential solutions. By mapping the farm space, the ...

Column：Community in Literature   043-053   Details

Author：Liliang Lan

Abstract: Mori Ogai's The Dancing Girl tells the story of a modern individual's self-awareness, self loss, and eventual return to the national system through the sentimental first person narrative. In terms of narrative, the love confession narrative in the novel is seen as a discourse behavior originating from the awakening of modern individual spirit, expressing an implicit criticism of the state ideology that suppresses individual subjectivity. In terms of character portrayal and spatial setting, the novel utilizes a character akin to trickster or clown and a contrasting ...

Column：Narrative and Identity Construction   054-065   Details

Author：Wenting Liang

Abstract: How Much of These Hills Is Gold, the debut novel by Chinese American female author C. Pam Zhang, is characterized by its haunting new-century vision of the American West. It brings new faces from a Chinese American family to the myth of the American West, a native gold miner, a Chinese fisherwoman and their orphaned girls, focusing on the family’s multiple and intersected types of passing, and featuring an ambivalence to settler colonialism and indigeneity in native or migrant diasporas of the west. This enables the novel to break the limitation ...

Column：Narrative and Identity Construction   066-076   Details

Author：Peilin Ye

Abstract: Virginia Woolf is an important modernist novelist and an artist who has strong interests in multiple media and forms systematic theoretical viewpoints on each kind of them. She not only discusses the speciality of different media including painting, music, opera, and cinema in comparison with literature, but also exp...

Column：Topics in Modern and Contemporary Literature   077-088   Details

Author：Qiong Li

Abstract: Paul Auster fictionalizes two kinds of reality in 4321. One is of the alternative personal lives that may well be real in the parallel worlds, the other is about the real-life American history that spans seventy years of the twentieth century. The former accords with the many-worlds theory and its conception of reality, stressing on the ideas of multilayered being and ontological indeterminacy and fortuity. The latter highlights the anti-war movement and the rebellion at Columbia University in the 1960s. It exposes the fictionality and dark sides of American ...

Column：Topics in Modern and Contemporary Literature   089-098   Details

Author：Xi Zhang

Abstract: Against the background of frequent environmental problems, contemporary environmental poetry originating in the West and traditional Chinese philosophy have been integrated into a harmonious state through cross-cultural integration. The ideological themes and aesthetic styles of environmental poetry have been diversified and expanded, and the ecological core of traditional Chinese philosophy has also been modernized and interpreted and disseminated. Although American environmental poet Snyder and Chinese poet Hua Hai live in different ...

Column：Topics in Modern and Contemporary Literature   099-112   Details