Abstract: Cultural poetics with realistic characteristics is a natural result in the development of contemporary Chinese literary theory. The resistance to the Soviet model and the recognition of the western model made the literary theory prosperous in theories, methods and discourse extension in 1980's, and the confusion in self identity, thinking modal and the expression of literary theory, which led further to the wide-spread anxiety on literature in that times. The conceptual shifts in the upsurges of method, subjectivity, language and then culture reflect the pain-staking thinking on the contemporary literary theory and the impact on the thinking inertia in the settled mode. The localized literary theory was established by combining “subjectivity” and “cultural view” by getting rid of the anxiety and seeking a theoretical breakthrough. Thus, cultural poetics with the contemporary spirit and Chinese characteristic is coming into being, and the localization of cultural poetics is a reflection and reconstruction in the context of cultural shift. By confronting the generalization of the interpretation objectives, the trend of uncontrolled theoretical issues, the dissolve of discourse logic and the emptiness of aesthetic values, cultural poetics in China illustrates its difference from cultural poetics in the New Historicism, which derived from post-modernization philosophy in the western countries.

Key words: theoretical weightlessness, literary anxiety, cultural vision, cultural poetics, postmodernism