As a country without the influence of a predominant religious institution, China provided a model of secular state and good governance for European intellectuals during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. John Webb (1611–1672), a disgruntled English architect, wrote a curious essay on the Chinese language as the Adamic language created by God in the Garden of Eden, and this should be understood in the specific context of the seventeenth-century pursuit of the perfect language with strong political implications. Without personal experience of China or any knowledge of the Chinese language, Webb’s peculiar argument reflects even better the idea of China in Restoration England, and by revisiting Webb’s essay on the seventeenth-century background, we may realize how positive the image of China was at that time, how it was completely reversed and erased during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in the age of colonialism and imperialism, and more significantly, how important it is to rethink the history of Chinese-Western encounters that is so crucial, so relevant, and so important for our world today.

In much of its history from the nineteenth century to the last decade of the twentieth, comparative literature remained largely Eurocentric, and surveys or histories of the world's literatures were mostly written by Western scholars from a West-centred perspective. Literature: A World History (LAWH) took the first step in writing a history of literature of the world from a non-Eurocentric point of view by having the voices of the world's different traditions heard and by distributing the proper space to macro-regions more equally than ever before. That is the most significant contribution this long and arduous project made for a better understanding of the world's literatures.

This essay explores several aspects or dimensions of literary translation. First, translation offers pleasure in the reading experience, and for translators, literary translation is a creative or re-creative activity. Sometimes, a translation may become a better work than the original. Second, the ideas of incommensurability and untranslatability are misleading and harmful, and the so-called critique of the “hegemony” of English is not only disingenuous and hypocritical but also prevents non-Western literary works from being translated and known in the world as part of world literature. Finally, with several concrete examples, this essay argues for the importance of cultural understanding in successful translations.

History and literature are different ways to satisfy the basic human desire to preserve what is memorable, beautiful, or painful against all-devouring time and the transience of human experience, and to commemorate what is meaningful and valuable in our personal or collective memories. It is thus not surprising that history and literature share certain structural similarities in recuperating the past with vivid descriptions, believable characterizations, and coherent, convincing narratives. The sense of history is not an antiquarian interest in a dead and detached past, but a vivid and living experience of what is relevant at the present, and H-G. Gadamer's hermeneutic concept of "contemporaneity" (Gleichzeitigkeit) offers a helpful theoretical framework for understanding the immediacy of our experience of the past in literary or historical representations. But there is also an important difference between literary and historical representations in that the historian is epistemologically and morally bound to what actually happens, while the poet or the novelist is free to construct a fictional representation through imagination unrelated to actuality. In the Chinese tradition, there is the concept of "the historian's virtue" and a historian is committed to the true record of history at any cost, even his life. By drawing on some exemplary works of ancient Chinese literature and historiography, this essay discusses some of the theoretical issues related to the writing and the understanding of history and try to lead to the mutual illumination of poetry and history rather than their opposition and mutual exclusion.

Chinese-Western comparative literature is a difficult area of study that requires a high level of competence in languages, cultures, and histories across the huge differences between China and the West. It also has the remarkable potential to make contributions to comparative literature and comparative poetics. This essay discusses the exemplary works of Zhu Guangqian and Qian Zhongshu as our predecessors and continues to explore the different relationship between parallelism and end rhyme as an example of making contributions to comparative poetics from the perspective of Chinese literature and criticism.

The writing of history has encountered many challenges in twenty-century theoretical discussions, and postmodernism and deconstruction in particular have made literary history all but impossible in the West. Because world literature today remains the canonical works of Western literature, while much of the non-Western literatures and even “minor” European literatures remain unknown and untranslated, a world history of literature is absolutely necessary to introduce the yet-unknown world literature to a global readership beyond the original linguistic and cultural milieux of those unknown literary works. Translating those yet-unknown works into English for a wider circulation is the first step to make world literature go beyond Eurocentrism, and writing a world history of literature will help us know the basic situation of the world’s literary traditions from a truly global perspective.

In this interview, Zhang Longxi explores topics and approaches that have made him one of the leading scholars on cross-cultural studies in the world. Longxi’s innovative understanding of both the relationship between East and West and literary hermeneutics is clarified in his latest contribution, World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon, which aims at suggesting that world literature may favor a productive way to return to the reading of literature.

自新冠肺炎疫情肆虐以来,我们都有隔离的经验,无论是政府为防止疫情扩散推行的措施,还是个人因为担心受到感染、自我保护而闭门不出,"保持社交距离"已成为一个广泛流行的新词,反映一种普遍的生活经验.疫情对国计民生有极大影响,这自不待言.仅从个人的角度说来,人都是社会的动物,其本性就希望与其他人接触交往,所以长期隔离,不能与亲朋好友见面相聚,在心理和身体方面,都可能对人产生伤害,这也可以说不言而喻.

Modernization and the preservation of traditional culture and sociopolitical systems became major issues for all East Asian countries, and they embarked on very different roads in their development and historical destinies. The traditional “Sinosphere” with the Chinese written language and culture at the center changed into a very different East Asian region of a globalized world, and in literature and culture, Western influence replaced Chinese in all of East Asia. Poetry was the major form of literary expression and continued to be written with a great variety of styles. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao are also important figures in the “revolution of poetry.” New Youth quickly became the most influential journal of the May Fourth new culture movement. New poetry had a remarkable development in the years after the Cultural Revolution, representing ideas and sentiments of most people in the “new era.”