From Mimesis Theory to Possible World: A Theoretical Reconstruction of Literary Authenticity under a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Aristotle’s mimetic theory in Poetics centers on probability and necessity, and has constructed the generative mechanism of literary authenticity. Rather than replicating reality, poetry creates a meaningful world of possibility based on the principle of universality. Correspondingly, LI Yu advanced the "inside seven emotions" principle in his Occasional Notes with Leisure Motions. He highlighted the dialectical relationship between plausible rationale and innovative depiction of the emotions. His theories echo Aristotelian poetics across Chinese and Western civilizations, since both treat literature as a reality-independent cognitive system. Lubomír Doležel’s "possible world theory" has provided a contemporary interpretive framework for such literary autonomy. Literary fiction constructs a heterogeneous universe parallel to reality under the constraints of four modal systems, namely alethic, deontic, axiological and epistemic. Aristotle’s universal narration, LI’s dialectics of virtuality and reality, and Doležel’s modal constraints achieve a paradigmatic breakthrough against traditional mimesis theory. They do so respectively from the dimensions of classical poetics, traditional opera practice and narratology. Collectively, these three perspectives reveal the essential function of literature, which constructs a self-consistent semantic space via systematic rules. This process breaks free from real experience and offers a transcendental dimension for human cognition. This reconstruction of the theoretical pedigree not only dispels the metaphysical presupposition that literature is subordinate to reality, but also opens up new prospects for cross-cultural poetic dialogue.