Construction Of Paradigms And Paradigm’s Shifts Of History Of Foreign Literature In The New Period

Since Zhou Zuoren’s "History of European Literature" was published in1918, which is the first work of history of foreign literature, so far an overall number of history of foreign literature has beyond seven hundred. Issues related to compilation of history of foreign literature have become one hotspot in academic circle of history of foreign literature in recent years. However, most of previous studies started from historical data and concentrated in one or several of the specific works of literary history, but were lack of theoretical depth and macro-perspective vision of academic history. Therefore, with use of relevant theory, this article is mainly under the vision of academic history, and focus on history of foreign literature since the new period, to make an overall investigation and research of compilation of history of foreign literature.This dissertation calculates compilation and publication about the history of foreign literature from1918to2012explicitly, and teases the general situation of compilation of history of foreign literature. It focuses on the commonness and individuality of historical works in the same period, and the relation and difference between historical works in different periods. On that basis, according to Kuhn’s theory of paradigm, it interprets and analyzes of several important works of history of foreign literature, and explains the concrete evolution process about the construction and transformation of history of foreign literature.Before the new period, Zhou Zuoren’s "History of European Literature", Zheng Zhenduo’s "The Outline of Literature" and other works of literary history have constructed the early paradigm of history of foreign literature. These works reflected the nature of enlightenment and education. After the new period, the early mode gradually declined. Marxist theory is widely used instead of traditional comment style of history and extensive using of translation in the compilation of history of foreign literature. The representative work of this period is "History of European Literature", which is edited by Yang Zhouhan. This literary history not only declared that the paradigm of history of foreign literature has formed, but also marked the transformation of old and new paradigms. Since then, discussions and debates about "Rewriting Literary History" were intense, and cognitive philosophy, post-colonialism, deconstructionism and other western literary theories also had impacts on the writing of literary history. Those formed a crisis in writing of literary history, and changed the concepts of literary history, narrative style, discourse system and other aspects of history of foreign literature.