Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.3, 2019

Integration and Innovation: Review of Studies of Literary Anthropology in China in 70 years

(Abstract)

Tan Jia

Different from the trajectory of anthropology in Western academia, the booming of literary anthropology in China had come a long way from the New Culture Movement as its gestation period, and budbreak with the renaissance of literary theories and taking shape in the discipline of comparative literature in the new era of 1980s.The Chinese school of literary anthropology has had the comprehensive institutions, team working and daily operational scheme for seventy years. It aims for the multiple integration in terms of disciplines: the new holistic enunciation of anthropology from the view of literature, depicting the coexistence of multi-nationality within “Chinese literature” as the new approach of literary studies; theoretical innovation on mythology--the overlapping zone of literature and anthropology; reexamination of cultural texts in the view of great culture tradition in the hope of constructing “thing”(wu) system and methodology for the studies of early Chinese thought.