Literary Axioms: A Conceptual Framework for Literary Creation, Interpretation, and Evaluation

Summary

How can the conceptual commitments of a literary work connect its creation, interpretation, and evaluation? We propose Literary Axioms, a conceptual framework in which a work develops a configuration of claims about experience and commitments to literary form. A literary axiom is a provisional organizing premise whose scope and textual realization can be examined. The framework develops the proposal by Qiang Liu that writers select and combine such premises, realize them through characters, events, language, and form, and make them available for reconstruction by readers. We distinguish an open axiom space, a selected configuration, its relational organization, and situated reader reconstructions. This yields an account of coherence as organized compatibility or conflict, originality as a change in claims, relations, or realization, and interpretive richness as a plurality of textually grounded reconstructions. Five dimensions connect this account to literary evaluation: coherence, contextual reach, distinctiveness, realization fidelity, and interpretive richness. We specify boundary cases and derive five empirical predictions with observations that would count against them. A concrete implementation contains 1455 Chinese language records, 1464 mappings to 149 works, and 472 typed relationships. A descriptive audit establishes the structural integrity of the artifact and identifies gaps in reuse, context coding, and provenance. The paper contributes a theory based framework, an inspectable implementation, and a research program. Its predictions await reader and creative writing studies.