Volume 10, No. 1

In the context of modern Chinese literature, realism has long occupied a central position, yet it has consistently been marked by conceptual ambiguity and divergent evaluations. A systematic review of Jiang Chengyong’s significant research on realist literature makes it clear that his sustained inquiry into the problem of realism is not only a central thread running through nearly half a century of his academic career, but also a distinctive hallmark of his scholarly style and intellectual orientation. By distinguishing the traditional realist conception based on the theory of mimesis from the “modern realism” generated within the context of scientific rationality, Jiang breaks through the rigid understanding that equates realism with surface representation, elevating it to a literary concept and cognitive paradigm endowed with modernity. In terms of research approach, he consistently proceeds from specific authors and works, integrating interdisciplinary perspectives from the history of literary movements and the history of natural science, thereby revealing the mechanisms through which modern realism emerged within the modern cultural structures of the nineteenth century, as well as its inherent internal tensions. Jiang’s research on realism not only deepens the understanding of the modernity of nineteenth-century Western realism, but also provides a theoretical point of reference with considerable historical depth and contemporary relevance for the reflection upon and reconstruction of realist literary discourse in China.

In the mid-twentieth century, the British scholar C. P. Snow raised the issue of the divide between scientific and literary cultures. In response to this well-known “Snow Problem,” Jiang Chengyong has, since the 1980s, consciously incorporated concepts and methods from systems theory, psychology, and related disciplines, situating nineteenth-century canonical literature within a multidisciplinary framework. Through renewed interpretations of classic texts, he has expanded the scope of research and promoted paradigm shifts in literary studies. Emphasizing the historical character of the nineteenth century as an “Age of Science,” Jiang elucidates how the rational spirit, empirical methodologies, and analogical modes of thought of the natural sciences shaped realism’s mimetic and truth-seeking orientations. He further clarifies the intrinsic connections and mechanisms of influence linking scientific progress, literary movements, and the rise of the novel. In methodological terms, Jiang adopts the study of the human as a unifying framework, integrating modern scientific findings from biology and psychology to examine the formation and transformation of “the human,” with particular attention to the profound changes that occurred when the human was incorporated into scientific discourse in the nineteenth century, thereby deepening the study of realism and naturalism. At the level of scholarly practice, Jiang employs psychological structural analysis, systems-theoretical models, and cultural personality studies to offer new interpretations of major writers and literary figures, such as Stendhal, Balzac, Goethe, and Byron. Characterized by systematic and interdisciplinary research, Jiang Chengyong’s scholarship has broadened the academic horizon of nineteenth-century Western literary studies, provided a new theoretical framework for the study of canonical literature, and achieved profound innovations in both research paradigms and scholarly discourse.

Taking “the human” as a guiding motif, Jiang Chengyong interprets the Western literary tradition and advances an overarching framework of historiographical significance: he posits Greco-Hebraic culture as a deep structure, foregrounds the complementarity of desire and reason, and, through a lens of continuity and variation, traces the evolution of ideas of the human across major stages of Western literature. Methodologically, he develops an analytical framework of literary anthropology in dialogue with intellectual history and related fields. On this basis, he proposes a mode of literary-historical writing organized around conceptions of human nature, presenting Western literary history as the development of humanistic spirit in Western society. His work exemplifies the original perspectives and scholarly paradigms Chinese scholars bring to humancentered approaches in Western literary studies.

Since the phenomenon of “Aphasia” in Chinese literary discourse was put forward, scholars have sought solutions by returning to traditional poetics, which can be named the “Root-Seeking Theory.” In response to this tendency, Jiang Chengyong proposed a new perspective of integration between Chinese and foreign cultures and mutual learning among civilizations, which can be named the “Variant Theory.” The “Root-Seeking Theory” has some flaws. Today, the construction of the literary discourse system is different from the traditional Chinese discourse system in terms of context and function. A simple return to the traditional discourse faces great difficulties. The “Variant Theory” provides a new way of thinking for the construction of the literary discourse system. It not only validates the exploration of the Chinese discourse system over the past century with an open cultural vision, but also affirms the variations that occur in the mutual exchange of Chinese and foreign literary discourses, believing that these variations contain new possibilities.

Grounded in the cultural standpoint of a Chinese scholar and guided by an open comparative perspective, Jiang Chengyong has developed a coherent research framework in comparative literature and world literature, spanning literary currents, humanistic themes, and interdisciplinary literary studies, and marked by clear methodological self-awareness and theoretical confidence. In studies of literary currents, he integrates historical, theoretical, and cultural analysis to forge a sustainable theoretical paradigm for the field in China. Centered on “human studies,” his work elucidates the generative mechanisms and evolutionary logic of Western literature. By advancing interdisciplinary dialogue between literature and science and advocating a critical engagement with Western theory alongside close textual reading, he contributes to the construction of an academic framework with distinct Chinese characteristics, while continuously innovating in teaching and textbook and MOOC development.

In research and teaching of foreign literature in China, many researchers tend to follow theoretical paradigms of Western literary study blindly due to their lack of holistic view of literatures’ development process, hence fail to deliver thorough and innovative Chinese interpretation of foreign literatures. Research on Western Literary Thoughts in the Nineteenth Century in six volumes edited by Jiang Chengyong offer a monumental breakthrough for this limit. Focusing on the localization of such Western literary thoughts in the nineteenth century as Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Aestheticism, Symbolism and Decadentism in China ever since the New Culture Movement in 1919, these six books illustrate the successive relations in-between these thoughts as well as the intercommunication among natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, thus succeed in constructing the generative knowledge genealogy of Western literary thoughts from China’s perspective.

Jiang Chengyong’s Canonical Reevaluation and Innovation in Western Literary Research Methods offers systematic explorations across three dimensions: theoretical consciousness of canonical re-evaluation, methodological construction, and practical transformation. The work transcends essentialist views of literary canon by establishing the historical generativity and cross-cultural constructiveness of classics. Methodologically, it constructs a triple framework encompassing microlevel close reading, Meso genealogy of literary trends, and macro-level theoretical reflection. In practice, it organically integrates archetypal criticism, narratology, and cross-cultural communication studies into an operational research paradigm. This monograph not only provides methodological resources for “rewriting literary history” but also contributes theoretical paradigms to the disciplinary construction of comparative literature, manifesting the academic turn from theoretical transplantation to methodological consciousness in contemporary humanities scholarship.

The historical forms of literary emotional expression are intimately bound to media conditions, as aesthetic experience and subject formation undergo continuous reconfiguration across different technological contexts. This study examines the historical evolution of literary affect from traditional societies through industrialization and digitalization to the contemporary AI environment, analyzing the structural transformation of emotional experience from holistic to fragmented modes and from collective to individualized configurations, while arguing for “aura” as a core aesthetic quality of literary emotional experience. Technological transitions have generated dual effects on emotional expression: industrialization and digital media have induced the standardization, fragmentation, and “entropic decline” of affect, while artificial intelligence further destabilizes classical paradigms of emotional authenticity and creative subjectivity. Yet technology also opens possibilities for reconstruction, as transmedia narrative and virtual reality expand new dimensions of emotional expression. This article proposes possible pathways for “human-machine collaborative creation,” demonstrating that digital-age “aura” is shifting from the static “here and now” toward a dynamic “distributed presence,” whose reconstruction requires dynamic equilibrium between technological enablement and humanistic values.

This paper explores the critical possibilities of “specters of realism” as a conceptual metaphor for realism’s place in literary history, its truth-seeking spirit as well as its approach to reality. Contrary to René Wellek’s description of realism as a “period-concept,” realism has made recurrent returns to the literary landscape, and, in a spectral gesture, disrupted the linear temporality of a literary history that sees realism as preceded by Romanticism and followed by Modernism and Postmodernism. Underlying the acts of mimesis is a realist impulse that compels writers to engage with reality through diverse representational strategies. Drawing on the “spectral turn” in cultural studies in the past three decades, this paper examines the circulation of “The Luo Cha Country and the Sea Market,” a mystical story from Liaozhai, and discusses Yan Lianke’s critical works such as The Veils of Liaozhai. It argues that the concept of mythorealism, proposed by Yan Lianke and exemplary of the contemporary realist enterprise, is premised on a hauntological epistemology that places the novel on the liminal position between the present and the absent, the material and the immaterial, and the visible and the invisible. The spectral metaphor, reforming and innovating the traditional realist theory which regards the writer as the observer/subject and reality as the observed/object, provides a new perspective on realism’s resilience and enduring vitality.