Wang Shouren and the Realist Turn in Contemporary World Literature: Foundational Theory, Postmodern Realism and Glocality.

Amid mounting discourse on contemporary literary realism in international academia, Wang Shouren, a leading Chinese scholar of foreign literature stands out as a championing figure in marshalling the recent academic turn to realism in China. In the past few decades, he has made unremitting endeavor towards constructing a systematic body of knowledge regarding literary realism. Weaving his way through voluminous scholarship on realism and histories of the 20th century and contemporary literature, he proposes a set of keywords (truth, mimesis, reality, fiction) and pathways (cognitive, aesthetic, affective, intermedial) to set up the theoretic foundation of realism for more meaningful academic exploration. At the same time, being a historian of postwar foreign literature, he teases out a steady strain of realism running through a variety of postmodern literary texts--first mainly sourced from postwar Anglo-American literature and later from a much wider scope of world literature including contemporary Chinese authors. As a result, Wang Shouren's outlook on realism extends both along the global and local axes towards a glocalized perception of literary realism as a pluralistic form open to proliferation and permutation in the remapping of the world literary system. In particular, his Chinese identity equips him with a distinct Chinese scope of view which consists in Chinese perspective, Chinese stance, Chinese insights and Chinese resources, enabling him to be an outstanding spokesperson for realism's contemporary manifestations in world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]