This book presents 18 highly influential essays on Chinese literature and semiotics by Professor Zhao Yiheng, including his analysis and discussions of the development of Chinese literature and its characteristics from traditional to modern times. It is divided into three parts: traditional Chinese literature, contemporary Chinese literature, and semiotics. In the first part, Professor Zhao summarizes the core elements of narrative cultural relations, ethical dilemmas, and narrative features. He also provides a comprehensive description of the formal structures in Chinese traditional literature. Taking the traditional Chinese play White Rabbit as a case, he discusses the connections between the narrative structure and the characteristics of Chinese novels and stratification of Chinese culture. 

Yiheng Zhao (1943-), Professor of Semiotics and Narratology at the College of Literature& Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, is currently the Director of ISMS (the Institute of Semiotics& Media Studies), Chairman of the Academic Committee of ACCS (The Association of Chinese Communication and Semiotic Studies), and member of the Collegium of IASS (The International Association of Semiotic Studies).  
He graduated from Nanjing University (B.A. 1968), the Graduate School of the Academy of Social Sciences (M.A. 1982), and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 1987). He taught at the School of Oriental& African Studies, University of London, for almost 20 years before resettling in China.  
He specializes in formal studies of art, literature, and culture. Since the late 1970s, he wrote two dozens of books and around 250 essays on those topics. His major works include The Uneasy Narrator (1994), Toward a Modern Zen Theatre (2001) in English, The Muse from Cathay (1983), Semiotics of Literature (1984), Comparative Narratology (1994), The Lure of the Other Bank (2003), Semiotics: Principles and Problems (2011), A General Narratology (2013), and Philosophical Semiotics (2017) in Chinese. Some of his works were republished in his 8-volume Selected Works (2013), and 12-volume Collected Works (2019). 

Part 1: Semio-Narratology.- Chapter 1. Redefining Signs/Symbol and Semiotics.- Chapter 2. The Fate of Semiotics in China.- Chapter 3. The Problem of Time in a General Narratology.- Chapter 4. The Narrator and His/Her/Its Duality.- Chapter 5. Middle Reclining: The Repositioning of Cultural Markedness.- Part 2: Traditional Chinese Literature.- Chapter 6. Subculture as Moral Paradox: A Study of the Texts of the White Rabbit Plays.- Chapter 7.Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture.- Chapter 8. Chinese Fiction and Its Narrator.- Chapter 9. The Cultural Status of Chinese Fiction. Chapter 10. The Second Tide: Chinese Influence on American Poetry Today.- Part 3: Recent Chinese Literature.- Chapter 11.The Rise of Metafiction in China.- Chapter 12.Pure Poetry, Impure Criticism, and the Power of Academia.- Chapter 13. Post-isms and Chinese New Conservatism.- Chapter 14. Fiction as Subversion: Yu Hua.- Chapter 15. Ma Yuan, the Chinese Fabricator.- Chapter 16.A Fearful Asymmetry: Novel of the Future in 20th Century China.- Chapter 17. Poetics of Death.- Chapter 18. River Fans Out Chinese Fiction Since the Late 1970s.- Chapter 19. The New Waves in Recent Chinese Fiction.