Abstract: The advent of the Big Data era highlights the importance of statistical methods. Franco Moretti and Stanford Literary Lab try to use some quantitative methods in literary researches. Their qualitative analysis on the data from books discovers some facts about literature that may challenge some established literary theories, and scholars are also trying to adopt the statistical methods to literary study in China. Statistical literary theory is literary research methodology with mathematical logic and empirical data, which comprises such methods as quantitative analysis, regression analysis, hypothesis test, and time series analysis. In term of its combination of aesthetics characteristics with scientific logic, it is revolutionary.

Key words: Big Data, Franco Moretti, quantitative analysis, statistical literary theory