This essay seeks to explore the shifting definitions of the borderland as a geopolitical space, a territorial gateway, a contact zone, a liminal terrain, a “state of exception,” and an imaginary portal. It looks into the intersection of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political and ecological dynamics that inform the cartography of the Chinese borderland, from the Northeast to the Southwest, from Inner Mongolia to Tibet, and from Nanyang (Southeast Asia) to diaspora. It reflects on the recent interdisciplinary growth in understanding the characteristics of borders and frontiers, including migration and settlement, cultural hybridity, and transnationalism. It also examines the boundaries of literature as it manifests itself in multiple forms of media and mediation. The essay focuses on four topics: bordering land, the human condition of precarity, imagined non-community and borderland as literature.

Following the thread of Karen Thornber's thoughts on “Global Health and World Literature,” this paper focuses on the writing of borderland experiences in Chi Zijian's The Stories of Northeast China. Blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, Chi situates her stories in the context of the global pandemic and makes the historical narrative a globally-oriented therapeutic method to address traumatic events. The “global perspective” indicates the inclusiveness and transcendence of these stories, while the “worldness” refers to their prevalence and fluidity. The fluidity of The Stories of Northeast China has multilayered meanings: firstly, it provides a new mode of literary circulation; secondly, it pays a particular attention to the material significance of daily life; thirdly, it highlights the mobility and fluidity within national/local literature. The so-called “borderland literature” takes its form as the “world literature” in an era when our daily life has been imbued with global forces politically, economically, and culturally. This collection of short stories and Chi Zijian's borderland experience shed light on our rethinking of the dialect between the marginality and the centrality, the local and the global.

This article establishes a novel interpretive framework to examine contemporary Chinese Southwest literary and cultural expressions. It explores the multiple implications of the Southwest as a culturally elastic borderland through three core concepts: topopoetics, fengwu, and hodology of forking paths. First, I examine the diverse and multifaceted notion of “Southwest” as manifested in literary traditions, languages, geopolitics, history, topography, religion, and ethnicity. Building on this foundation, I underscore the significance of topopoetics as a transmedial entity. It pertains to both topography and the tension between literary subjects and their environment. Furthermore, through Sinophone-Xenophone mesology, I propose the notion of fengwu to examine Southwest cultural expression. Finally, inspired by Kurt Lewin's concept of hodological space, I propose the concept of “hodology of forking paths” to elaborate the (in)visible and (im)possible networks of knowledge exchange through the transmission of topopoetic systems. Through these three concepts, I seek to provide another interpretive framework for understanding the Southwest as part of Chinese, Sinophone, and borderland articulations.

By discussing the migration topic of Li Juan's works, this article analyzes her ethnographic practice, reveals the transnational perspective, and explores the poetics of boundary-crossing. The “Ranch Series” presents the migration life of Kazakhs in Xinjiang through the method of thick description, showing the alterity awareness that transcends the boundary between the subject and the object. Li's other works show the vagueness, fluidity, and transgression of boundaries, which originated from her life of borderland and were influenced by the universal change of cognitive structure in writing. Migration is the crossing of various boundaries and the handover of different cultures. The poetics of boundary-crossing reveals the inherent ambiguity, indeterminacy, and fluidity of life. Li Juan's borderlands writing reminds us to rethink “difference”, “the Other-subject relationship” and comparative literature itself, and to investigate the meaning of China, the world, and the very act of writing itself.

This article attempts to unravel a paradox in the frontier poetry of Xiao Gang. Through a close reading of his two homonymous “Ballad of Joining the Military” poems, I highlight two radically divergent ways in which the Southern Liang Prince portrayed Emperor Wu of Han's conquest of the Western Regions. I argue that these paradoxical significations of empire can be understood through the patterns found within the historiography of the Han period; his lived experience of the Southern Liang's frontier; and his Buddhist views on the impermanence and essential unreality of worldly manifestations.

What happens when we juxtapose human and nonhuman literary journeys? How do the trajectories of nonhuman figures parallel or challenge the routes of human narratives? Are there any possibilities for zoopoetics to go beyond fables and allegories? This article takes up these inquiries by bringing into dialogue the works of four diasporic writers: on the one hand, the 1930s-1940s colonial tiger stories by the Russian émigré writer Nikolai Baikov and the Japanese writer Nakajima Atsushi's “Tiger Hunt” (1942) based on his lived experience in colonial Korea; and on the other, postmodern tiger-themed fantastic novels by two Asian women, Soulflight (1998) by the Germany-based Japanese writer Tawada Yoko and Bestiary (2020) by the Chinese American writer K-Ming Chang. By tracing the border-crossing literary figures of tiger across time and space, this article reveals the coloniality of the environment, language, and gender in their historical and narrative contexts, and explores the possibilities for a “borderland zoopoetics” in global East Asian literature.

“Tragedy” and “modernity” are normally viewed as two discrete concepts, one related to literature and the other to social theory, but they were coupled into two different cause/effect relationships in the early and middle parts of the 20^th century by some Chinese and Western literary critics. For George Steiner and his followers, modernity which is characterized by scientific rationalism has caused the demise of tragedy as a form of art after the 17^th century, but for Hu Shi and many other Chinese intellectuals of his time, it is the absence of tragedy that has partially caused the delay of modernity in China. In hindsight, neither of the propositions seems tenable because they are both predicated on too narrow an interpretation of what tragedy is, especially their overemphasis on sad ending as an indispensable element of tragedy.

Benjamin's ethics and political philosophy are often labeled as “nihilism”, but around the 1920s, Benjamin conceived the ethics of “happiness” in worldly existence in his drama studies. This article attempts to show that the daimon in ancient Greek thought has two opposite aspects in Benjamin's context: the fearsome dämonisch fate or the genius of liberty. German poetics has been deeply trapped in the entanglement of those two, and Goethe himself and his works are emblematic of this entanglement. For Benjamin, the order of priority of character and action in drama distinguishes those two: “Dämon” exists in classical tragedies and Christian fate dramas where action takes priority, in which life falls into the misfortune of retribution; “Genius” exists in the French classical comedy and Spanish baroque comedia where character takes priority, in which life returns to the fortune of spiritual life by contemplation. The differences between French comedy and Spanish comedia may partly explain why Benjamin abandoned the study of drama.

The spread and acceptance of Wang Anshi's poetry in ancient Korea can be divided into the landing period in the middle and late Goryeo Dynasty, the flourishing period in the early Joseon Dynasty, the submerged period in the middle Joseon Dynasty, and the revitalization period in the late Joseon Dynasty. The acceptance of Wang Anshi's poems in ancient Korea is from imitation to emulation to innovation; secondly, it is the rational recognition and acceptance rooted in the political perspective and intertwined with the literary perspective; and thirdly, it is in line with the aesthetic sentiment of the Korean cultural identity. The readership of Wang Anshi's poems has expanded from the scholar-officials to the middle class and eventually to the common folk, and has been integrated into the mainstream of ancient Korean poetry and literature, and the classic poems represented by “Plum Blossom”, “Mooring the Boat to Guazhou” and “Won-il” have completed the canonization from ancient Korea to the contemporary era, which has demonstrated the enduring artistic tension and strong vitality of Wang Anshi's poems, injected fresh blood into the ancient Korean Han language and national poetry, and offered insights for the global dissemination of national culture.

In 1801, Herder began publishing his final work, Adrastea, a quarterly magazine entirely authored by himself. Herder selected and serialized eighteen Chinese stories under the name “Exempel der Tage” in the seventh, eighth, and eleventh issues, which he referred to as his “confessions”. After a thorough examination, this study discovered that eight of them were indirectly translated from French and Latin texts, while ten were taken from the German translation of Du Halde's Description of China. The prototypes of these stories are derived from more than ten Chinese classics that ranged from the Spring and Autumn Period to the Ming Dynasty. After Herder introduced these stories, they spread further throughout Germany and Europe. “The Rat in the Statue” was even included in many German middle school textbooks. In his later years, Herder displayed his preference to Chinese culture, indicating a shift in his perception of China. This transformation is closely linked to his pursuit of the integration of politics and morality after experiencing various political and social upheavals in the late 18th century, as well as his belief in the progress of humanity through education.

This paper examines how Romain Rolland offered a sentimental education to modern Chinese intellectuals. Rolland's quasi-religious “oceanic feeling” strongly underpinned the “humanitarianism” that was emerging in post-May Fourth China; however, his portrayal of the “new man” with the oceanic feeling could never satisfy the political and literary demands of a socialist China in the making. Although Rolland's “oceanic feeling” drove him to sympathize with left-wing ideals, his ideas were ultimately incompatible with left-wing political ideals and literary demands. The more intense his emotional expressions became, the more questioned his portrayal of the “new socialist man” got. Ultimately, Rolland's influence on young Chinese scholars continued to lie in his sentimental education based on his “oceanic feeling.”

The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions has exerted a far-reaching influence, serving as a vehicle for East-West cultural exchange since the 19th century in the context of colonial expansion. This article describes the specific features of the “philological paradigm” within the paratext of Thomas Watters' English translation of The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. It explores the construction of this translation and uncovers the translation norms underlying its “philological paradigm.” In translating The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions into English, Watters emphasized the original text's editions and etymological examination of the cultural terminology, as well as cross-referencing and textual corrections with relevant literature. This approach reveals his understanding of the source text, granting the translation added interpretative significance. The “philological paradigm” reflected in his paratext is based on an objective and impartial study of complex cultural, linguistic, and religious phenomena, with a text-centered focus aimed at representing and reconstructing the work's socio-historical context for readers. This serves as a reference for the translation of classical texts in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The literary circle in Russia refers to the literature reflecting modern culture and life of northeastern China as Northeastern Literature which has a lot in common with Russian literature and culture. Due to profound connection with Russian literature and culture, Northeastern Literature gains attention in Russia, and its translation and related study in Russia play an important role in cultural exchange and mutual learning between China and Russia. The Russian translation of Northeastern Literature began in the 1930s and has shown intermittent fluctuations influenced by the bilateral relations and cultural policies of two nations. With the works of several generations of northeastern writers successively being translated in Russia, Russian perception of Chinese northeastern literature has evolved from the representation of anti-Japanese literature to a demonstration of the diversity in Chinese socialist realist literature, ethnic literature, women's literature, and postmodern literature. Russian interpretations of Northeastern Literature exhibit a self-reflective nature, seeking to draw lessons for their own struggles for national survival and unification.

“America” serves as a mixture of phenomena and concepts in later works of Eileen Chang. Chang wrote about American social geography including the landscapes that stirred a myriad of thoughts in the observer, stereotypes and role play in the multiethnic society, and the fragmentation and self-adjustment of political and cultural communities under the impact of the reform movements of the 1960s. The exploration of American social reality in Chang's later works encompasses the global geographical scope and the historical span of civilizational exchanges. It also embodies the coherent themes that relate to her early works, constituting the sum of her personal knowledge and experience. American social geography sketched in Chang's literary works is integrated with the re-socialization of her foreign life, highlights the uncertainty of perspectives, emotional attitudes, and identity expression arising from the immigrant subject's encounters with both familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, and thus reflects the deepening awareness of real-world issues and the dynamic shifts in her relative positions.

From the perspective of Chinese literature as a whole, there are certain differences and interactive relationships between the narratives of Shanghai in overseas Chinese literature and those in China. In terms of theme writing, its narrative focuses on constructing a “memory field” within the framework of mobility, including the overseas extension of citizens' everyday memories, the cross-regional transformation of urban folk virtual memories, and the interwoven narratives of identity memory and urban memory. At the same time, overseas writers have introduced a cross-cultural perspective into the expression of Shanghai's urban culture, highlighting the intertwining and dynamic interplay of different cultural contexts within the city through narratives of cross-regional mobility. This narrative has flowed back to China, sparking significant responses and interactions, reflecting the dynamic mobility between the dispersion and aggregation of Shanghai literature.

Chen Dongdong has used the term “baroque” many times in his poetic essays and poems. The term “baroque writing” can be used to refer to his creative work of more than forty years. Taking western studies as a reference, Chen Dongdong's “baroque writing” presents two directions: firstly, as Ernst Robert Curtius and others have argued, “Baroque” is the embodiment of a long history of “mannerism”, and Chen Dongdong's aesthetic qualities are basically in line with the tradition of Southern poetry which corresponds to it in general; secondly, as Walter Benjamin's study with a historical-social-critical dimension has shown, “baroque” foreshadows the characteristics of modernist poets and writers, such as Charles Baudelaire and Franz Kafka, and Chen Dongdong has sought to incorporate the local experience of modernity into his own work. These two aspects correspond to the classical origin and modernity of Chen Dongdong's works respectively, and also illustrate his inheritance and reinvention of Chinese Southern poetic tradition.

As a narrative paradigm, the “Chinese stories” have been cited, interpreted, translated, adapted, and variably transmitted in world literature, embodying both the subjectivity and creativity of the Chinese spirit. Engaging with world literature studies through the “Chinese stories” aims to reconstruct a new methodological and theoretical perspective, i.e. establishing the subjectivity of Chinese culture in the context of globalization, excavating the knowledge production and discourse mechanisms of the “Chinese stories” in world literature through the archaeology of knowledge, and constructing a global genealogy of the “Chinese stories”. Based on the “Database of ‘Chinese Stories' in World Literature,” incorporating digital humanities technology, and relying on historical materials and textual evidence, this article maps the global trajectory of “Chinese stories” to reveal their rich complexity and multidimensional dissemination. Furthermore, it visualizes the productive dynamism and impact of classic narratives such as “The Orphan of Zhao” and “The Legend of the White Snake” in world literature and how they engage in the co-construction of world civilization through their structural integrative power. This study thus advances new methodologies, perspectives, and pathways in world literature studies.

“The Global Factors of 20th Century Chinese Literature” is an important theoretical concept proposed by Chen Sihe in his study of the relationship between Chinese and foreign literature in the 20th century. Through his sustained reflection on and constant deepening of this proposition, Chen gradually enriched the theoretical connotation of “global factors” and developed it into a relatively systematic theoretical method. This method not only provides a new analytical framework for the study of Chinese-foreign literary relations, but also creates a new paradigm for 20th-century Chinese literary studies. The problem awareness and theoretical approach of “global factors” have significant academic implications for breaking through the limitations of traditional concepts and research paradigms in comparative literature, enhancing the goal awareness of comparative literature, innovating and deepening research in world literature, translation studies and the overseas dissemination of Chinese literature and culture. In comparative literature, a problem-oriented approach based on “global factors” enables scholars to extract, from the specific texts and phenomena of world literature, factors with shared poetic significance, thereby constructing a poetic genealogy of global factors in world literature. The establishment of this genealogy not only presents the dialectical relationship between the diversity and unity of world literature through concrete and vivid literary facts, but also provides significant theoretical support and practical evidence for the construction of a common poetics.

The “Chinese stories” widely circulating in world literature are a manifestation of China's cultural soft power. These “Chinese stories” mostly originate from China, and after being introduced to foreign countries, are re-created by foreign writers and integrated with the essence and cultural characteristics of foreign literature, becoming new works that bridge Chinese and foreign literatures. This paper makes a preliminary analysis of this process, categorizing the adaptation and re-creation of “Chinese stories” by foreign writers into five main types: full absorption, modified interpretation, adapted transformation, assimilative localization, and complete reconstruction. At the same time, combined with the theory of narratology, we analyze four narrative paradigms in the process of reconstructing Chinese stories in foreign countries, and combined with the attractiveness of Chinese stories in terms of artistic achievements, cultural values and discourse function, we analyze the artistic inspiration, cultural connotation and cultural values that Chinese stories have provided for the literatures of different countries. This paper argues that the citation of “Chinese stories” in world literature not only spreads the voice of China, but also promotes the exchange of Chinese and foreign cultures and mutual learning as well as the development of world literature.

The American sinologist Stephen Owen, from the perspective as the other, has scrutinized Chinese classics and infused a strong sense of self-awareness and identity anxiety into his understanding of Chinese classics, characters in those texts, and their authors, which enriches the image of the character, distinguishes the ethical stand of the author, and endows his interpretation with distinct psychological features. From the material world presented in the text, he analyzed the possession and behavior (such as naming private properties and composing a poem to a given tune in a family feast) of the poets in the Tang and Song dynasties, revealing the moral taboo behind textual symbols and offering the interpretation of great historical and cultural significance. In the contrast of poetry and irony, the Chinese drama, temporarily away from the role as an entertainment and a pastime, was given the aesthetic value of irony. It is in this sense that Owen's unique interpretative perspective has rectified the pattern of Darwinian evolution applied in the literary history. The perspective of Stephen Owen for interpreting Chinese stories is summarized as highlighting self-awareness and identity anxiety, focusing on the material world and moral taboo presented in the text, and emphasizing the contrast between poetry and irony. It is his unique interpretative perspective and discursive construction that establishes the dialogue between the text and the context, the character and the environment, as well as the history and the present.

The “Chinese Stories” is not only a literary, political, ideological and conceptual vehicle at the narrative level, but also a methodological approach to understanding the relationship between the self and the other. As one of the innovative approaches in regional and country studies, it is also applicable to the study of China's literary relationship with Southeast Asia. Due to the differences in geography and history between China and Southeast Asian countries, as well as the diversity in political systems, cultural traditions, and religious beliefs of Southeast Asian countries, “Chinese stories” have formed their own distinctive features in the process of dissemination in Southeast Asia, which are constantly being injected with new connotations with the flow of history. The empathy of intellectuals in Southeast Asian countries with the “Chinese stories” and the factors of the times have also shaped the shared patterns of the citation and interpretation of the “Chinese stories” in Southeast Asian literature.

This paper explores the pathways and mechanisms through which Chinese stories enter the realm of world literature from the perspective of cultural semiotics. By employing mathematical modelling approaches and analyzing typical cases, the paper first examines the creative process of cultural signs within Chinese stories and the generative mechanisms underlying their connotations, thereby revealing their role in constructing the cultural identity of the Chinese people. Subsequently, it investigates the recursive interpretation phenomenon of cultural signs during the translation process, portraying the role and function of translators in sign conversion across different cultural domains. Building on this foundation, the paper further discusses the flow of cultural signs from Chinese stories within the global literary system, as well as the semantic shifts and derivative phenomena that these signs experience in the context of world literature. To this end, the paper constructs a triple function expression to represent Chinese stories as cultural signs, providing a novel analytical model for understanding the global appeal of Chinese stories. The paper concludes that the world literary attributes embodied in Chinese stories exhibit a positive correlation with the interpretation of their cultural signs within the semantic field of world literature, and that effective interpretation and dissemination of cultural signs are crucial for the integration of Chinese stories into the realm of world literature.

As one of the representatives of the Transcendentalist movement, Henry David Thoreau had a special affinity for Confucianism. His work Walden contains more than ten references to the Four Books, but the quotes were not taken from any English translation available at the time. Rather, Thoreau translated them from G. Pauthier's French version Confucius et Mencius: les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine. The reason was that all the three English translations at the time were from Christian missionaries and were colored with varying degrees of religious bias and Calvinistic theology. This arrogant religious stance did not fit in with Thoreau, who was in the midst of the New England Renaissance. Thoreau's Confucian references were not mere decoration, but had profound philosophical significance. Thoreau was mainly concerned with the brilliance of human nature in Confucian thought, personal introspection and inner renewal that leads to social betterment, the virtue of caring for the world, and the idea of cultivating one's mind. He carefully integrated these ideas into his notion of individualism. The fact that the Four Books found their way into Thoreau's field of vision and texts proves that the Confucian central idea, viz., “The way of the superior man is vast yet subtle,” provided a lively spiritual resource for the concept of individualism of Thoreau and even the whole Transcendentalist movement.

In 1854, American sinologist S. Wells Williams translated the first 19 chapters of The Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms (Dongzhou Lieguozhi) into English for the first time. In 1880, he revised and republished the first three chapters amidst the Anti-Chinese Movement. In this translation, Williams selected historical facts and fictional content, adding introductions and annotations to present the novel as a “historical record”, so as to spread Chinese knowledge, promote a positive image, and counteract anti-Chinese sentiments. This paper, using various archival sources, reconstructs the origins and motivations of Williams' translation, identifies the source text, and analyzes his choices in presenting Chinese history and culture. Through the case, it seeks to enhance understanding of the history of sinology and translating Chinese classical literature in the English-speaking world, revealing the complex connections between the overseas transmission of Chinese literature and Sino-American relations during this period.

It is widely acknowledged both at home and abroad that Qian Zhongshu was a connoisseur of classical literary heritage with profound aesthetic sensibilities. However, few recognize him as an aesthete capable of extracting principles from his aesthetic insights and modeling them into theoretical frameworks. This may be due to the academic community's failure to use Qian's “bridging” methodology to illuminate the intrinsic connections within his body of work, as well as its latent linkages with Western intellectual giants like T.S. Eliot. Therefore, a systematic analysis of the intricate mechanisms within the “Theory of Poetic Correspondence” is necessary. This involves integrating Qian's “Molecular Poetics” rooted in his “Theory of Imagery” into Eliot's framework of the “objective correlative.”

“Fiction” is a commonly used concept in literary studies, which has long existed in ancient Chinese texts, typically referring to “fabricating falsehoods,” “groundless,” or “absurd speech.” However, during the Meiji period, Japanese scholars began to adopt it as a key concept to embody modern literary ideas. It has since been employed to explain the nature of literature, denote literary genres, and describe narrative strategies. It has gradually become a widely influential term in literary theory and criticism alongside words such as “imagination.” Translating the western term “fiction” into Chinese not only shows the influence of Western learning but also reflects the transmission of western culture into China through Japanese translation. As a productive concept, “fiction” has become a specimen for examining the modernization of Chinese literary theory and criticism. In this regard, it has significantly altered the way of thinking and forms of knowledge in Chinese literary theory and criticism, providing a vivid case and valuable experience for the modern transformation of ancient Chinese literary theory.

From “spots of color” to “a pattern”, and from “super-position” to “presentation of facets,” Ezra Pound continuously revises his definitions of the image and the image-producing ideogrammic method in his two recollections of his metro station experience and in various versions of the metro poem. His idiosyncratic prose style and the fact that there is no comment from him on the subtle yet notable changes in different versions of the metro poem result in diversely different understandings of the image that is the core of his poetics. Misinterpretations and disagreements arouse particularly in discussions about how his poetics is related to Kandinsky's aesthetics and how the image can be redefined as the vortex. This essay examines the “color” and “pattern” versions of the metro poem from the perspective of duhua or lone-transformation and its related notions of alternative interconnectedness. Proposed by the Chinese philosopher Guo Xiang (252-312) in his annotations of the Zhuangzi, duhua offers a unique lens of non-dependence or non-engagement/attachment that is helpful and efficient in exploring the original meaning of the image as the “primary pigment,” as Pound calls it.

In A Chinese Mirror (1925), Florence Ayscough, a well-known sinologist, has rejected the Anglophone conventions of rendering the Yangtze River into sites of imperial desires from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Instead, she brings to the fore the Great River's literary and historical legacies long obliterated by Western colonists, thus reterritorializing the Yangtze River in the context of cosmopolitan cultural exchanges. Drawing on theories of “vertical travel” recently configured in the field of Anglophone travel literature studies, this paper demonstrates the over-layered textual strategies Ayscough has employed to render her travels along the Yangtze River into a journey of cultural translation and critiques of imperialism and Eurocentrism, and a productive journey of realizing her cosmopolitan ideas. In doing so, she not only affirms the Chinese temporality, models her narrative on the Chinese classical genre of “river diary”, interposes translations and quotations to construct intertextuality, but also utilizes strategies of reminiscing over the past and constant comparison to articulate her cosmopolitan visions and profound affinity with and attachment to Chinese culture.

The application of emotion recognition and computation to literary works has gradually become a hot topic in recent digital humanities research. Most of the computational methods mainly rely on the sentiment lexicon, that is, by retrieving the emotion words in the research text and assigning values through the lexicon. In the current research, the common directions include the sentiment analysis, the drawing of sentiment arcs, the classification of emotional patterns of different genres, the emotional analysis of character orientation, and the calculation of the relationship between emotion and space-time. However, there are still many defects in the calculation method, and the stylistic diversity and narrative complexity of literary works also bring many additional difficulties to emotional computaion. There are still many problems to be solved in this field.

Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873, was a widely influential work in the second half of the 19^th century in England, and its description of the qualities of “pleasure” in the works of Botticelli, an early Renaissance artist, is of great theoretical significance. As one of the main representatives of “rediscovering” Botticelli in 19^th-century British culture, Pater's use of the term “pleasure” in his critical writing not only serves as a descriptive term, but also as an appropriate theoretical concept, pointing to a multifaceted historical perspective. In critical theory since the 20^th century, this historical perspective has been an inspiration for the interdisciplinarity of critical studies, and especially for the communication between art criticism and historical writing.

Yeweiyang, the Chinese version of the Western play W przededniu translated into Chinese during the modern era, holds a significant historical importance in the realms of modern Chinese drama and 20th-century Chinese literature. Its author, Leopold Kampf, was a Jewish writer born in the Polish-occupied zone under Austrian rule who created works in German while living in Germany, causing a complex identity background and cultural affiliation. W przededniu was banned in Germany and subsequently translated and disseminated to the United States, France, and other European countries, leading to varying levels of success due to differences in translation quality and target audience. The French translation, after being further translated by Li Shizeng and Ba Jin, gained wide popularity in China and had a lasting impact. The success of the play in China can be attributed not only to the subjectivity and translation strategies of the translators, but also to the harmonization of its core elements with the social needs of various historical stages in modern China. This alignment has allowed the play to serve as a mirror reflecting the “other”, fulfilling the inner expectations and spiritual pursuits of its audience.

Wisdom literature constitutes an important part of Hebrew classics, which focuses on the essence, cognition, and application of wisdom. Its genre, character, and knowledge spectrum lack of comparable examples, especially in Proverbs and Job. In fact, these elements bear the imprint of foreign cultural influences, primarily from Mesopotamia, reflecting the impact of its knowledge structures and cultural heritage on Jewish sages. These influences have left what can be termed an “enclave” within Hebrew wisdom literature, and can be recognized from the characters as debaters, court advisors and astrologists in Hebrew wisdom literature. Tracking the knowledge spectrum and cultural stream of Hebrew wisdom literature not only makes it possible to acquire insights of Jewish wisdom tradition itself, but also serves as examples to reveal the relationship between Hebrew and Mesopotamian literary tradition and spectrum.