Xianzhang Zhao born in 1951, he is professor in Liberal Arts at Nanjing University. He is mainly engaged in teaching and researching the literary theory. Before the 1990s, his research interest lied primarily in formal aesthetics, focusing on the history and logic of western formal aesthetics. Among his publications during this period: General Th eory of Literary and Art Methodology; Chinese Artistic Reason; Western Formal Aesthetics (co–authored with Zhang Hui and Wang Xiong); Methodology of Literary Th eories and Aesthetic. He advocates that literary research shoul “clarify meaning through form”, instead of “going beyond the form to the theme”. From the 1990s to the end of the century, in the academic context of “intellectual history” or “thematic study” as the mainstream, the study of Chinese literature seriously ignored the study of literary form. ˜ erefore, he choose the perspective of “style” and embarked on the long road of “the study of formal aesthetics of literature”. In this stage, his works included: Style and Form; Temptation of Form; Archaeology and Aesthetics of Fine Arts (co–authored with Zhu Cunming); Literary Variations and Forms (co–authored with Bao Zhaohui). In the “image age” since the ˇ˛st century, he began to pay attention to the “image and text” form of “intertextuality between literature and image”, that is the study of “image theory of literature”. He has published works such as: Style and Image; Th e Study of Style and Form; Th e History of the Relationship Between Images in Chinese Literatur (chief–editor). These academic achievements not only open up a new problem domain, but also form the research method of “linguistic and graphic semiotics”.
