ABSTRACT
Cyber literary critics fall roughly into three categories: scholars, mass media, and netizens. This chapter traces the development of the three groups of critics by recounting the three phases during which the groups connected and mixed with each other. During the first phase, the groups coexisted but were largely separated from each other, whereas during the second phase, critics from different groups competed, which often led to conflicts, but the interaction also encouraged the development of cyber literary criticism. Finally, in the third phase, the division between scholars’ criticism and netizens’ criticism disappeared, and cyber literary criticism took on more diverse forms with the rise of new media.
