As literary scholars, we are often puzzled by these questions raised from among the reading public: What is the meaning of this literary work? How does the author express his/her intention to portray the characters or narrate the story? How shall we as literary critics interpret the meaning of the literary work? Can a certain literary work have only one meaning? Obviously this is not the case. In order to answer the above questions, we present this special cluster of articles (...) to readers.Péter Hajdu says pertinently in his essay, "We may suppose that the meaning of a literary text comes from somewhere, but we should not imagine that there is only one source it comes from." Thus, to Hajdu, meaning can have many... (shrink)

This article puts forward, from a Chinese and international perspective, a theoretical construction of world poetics, based on preliminary researches in the field. Its theoretical foundation mainly lies in three aspects: (1) World poetics is a theoretical sublimation of the research results of world literature and comparative poetics. (2) So far almost all the relatively universal literary interpretive theories are produced in the West, which can hardly cover all literary and theoretical categories and experiences. (3) Chinese literary theorists are always (...) concerned about the cutting-edge issues in international literary theory, and they have paid particular attention to comparative poetics. (shrink)