Comparative Literature in Chinese

In their article Comparative Literature in Chinese Xiaolu Wang and Yan Liu describe the development of comparative poetics in Chinese by sketching major publications and the general institutional situation of the discipline. Wang and Liu suggest that comparative work remains impulsive while at the same time dynamic. Like other fields in the humanities, the study of poetics — comparative or other — in Chinese is no longer traditional in terms of discursive form but copied from the West. Although the scholarly achievements in the field within the past thirty years are considerable, problems remain including the issue of translation of Western theories and the approaching of foreign scholarship with narrow minded nationalism. Wang\u27s and Liu\u27s postulate that the role scholars working in Chinese ought to play in the humanities in general and in comparative poetics in particular would be to bring about knowledge from the ways of how the issues and questions studied would cross cultural boundaries