A Brief Introduction to Foreign Literature Studies
Foreign Literature Studies (FLS hereafter) is a scholarly journal sponsored by the Ministry of Education in the People’s Republic of China and run by the Central China Normal University. Founded in September 1978, it is the first scholarly journal to be established within the discipline of foreign literature right after China started its “reform and open” movement. Initially, it began as a quarterly, but it has turned into a bimonthly publication since 2003 and published nearly 200 issues so far. In 1978, Xu Chi, a distinguished writer, was selected as the founding editor-in-chief of FLS; Wang Zhongxiang, a professor at the Central China Normal University, held the position between 1987-1998; Prof. Nie Zhenzhao served in this position between 1999-2016. Since 2017, Prof. Su Hui has become FLS’s fourth editor-in-chief and Nie Zhenzhao, now a professor at Zhejiang University, has served as its advisor. Since the beginning of the 21st century, FLS has set up and, from time to time, adjusted its internationalized editorial board, inviting 33 famous scholars from China, US, UK, France, Russia, Austria, Norway, Belgium, Estonia, Japan, and South Korea to serve on the board.
All along, FLS has committed itself to building a platform for academic exchange between China and other countries. Its academic influence has been expanding continuously both at home and abroad. The evidence is that it has been listed in SCOPUS, EBSCO, Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), MLA International Bibliography, American Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI, 2005-2016), Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI), A Guide to the Core Chinese Periodicals, A Guide to the Humanities & Social Science Core Journals in China, and other authoritative indexes in China and beyond. In addition, FLS was one of the first recipients of the grant for scholarly journals from the National Social Science Fund in 2012; it was listed as an “authoritative journal” in the literary category in “The Assessment Report on the Humanities and Social Science Journals in China” in 2014; it was selected as one of the Chinese scholarly journals with the greatest international influence in 2013 and 2016; it was ranked as an “A Category core journal” in “The AMI Assessment Report on the Humanities and Social Science Journals in China” in 2018 and 2020; it was recognized as a Chinese scholarly journal with superior international influence in 2020. In its long effort to turn itself into a respectable international journal, FLS has broken through new heights one after another, thus contributing to the promotion of Chinese scholarship in the world and the pursuit of discourse of power within the international academia.
FLS aims to establish itself as a prestigious international journal with unique Chinese characteristics by promoting Chinese discourse, exchanging scholarship between China and other countries, and publishing the latest scholarly writings on foreign literature and comparative literature from scholars both at home and abroad. In recent years, FLS has rolled out a series of uniquely designed and timely needed columns, such as Academic Interview, Dialogues between Chinese and Foreign Scholars, Ethical Literary Criticism, Poetry and Poetics Studies, Studies on Current Literary Issues, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and Showcase of the Major Projects Sponsored by National Social Science Fund.
For FLS, quality is of the utmost importance. We have consistently stuck to our existing system of anonymous review for submissions and adopted a floating system for “reviewing – editing – proofreading”. Based on its guiding principle of running the journal through “multiple channels, comprehensive coverage, and international collaboration,” FLS not only relies on paper media and traditional distribution network, but also actively cultivates other marketing channels, such as setting up its own WeChat account, on which it posts some of the excellent articles on a regular basis. In the meantime, FLS works hard to facilitate academic exchange and collaboration between countries and has established a cooperative relationship with more than 10 famous academic institutions around the world. In the past decade, FLS has sponsored more than 20 huge international scholarly conferences, which attracted numerous scholars, generated so many in-depth scholarly discussions, and won a warm response from the academia both at home and abroad again and again.