Based on a negativistic framework and contemporary literary issues, this paper makes an analysis of the limitations of the
three major ideas in ancient Chinese literary theory: the “spontaneous expression” of “the intellect, the moral and the emotional”. The author believes that, because of the lack of individualistic
understanding, the three classic categories cannot give rise to a unique worldview in the writers’ experience and understanding, not to speak of making distinctions between “the intellect, the moral, and the emotional” in the literary field and those in the non- literary. Whether referring to “literary representation” or “merging of the mind and the thing” or “imagery,” “expression” as a critical category cannot spotlight the
differences between literary creation and other creations or between differences in different writers’ creations. The emotional, which is directly opposed to the reasonable, is weak in making the “expression of the emotional” a real literary concept because “the unity of the emotional and the reasonable” is too general for writers to rely on the emotional.