Abstract: Since the mid 1990s, critics and theorists have begun to "re-visit" the relationship between literature and politics in an attempt to reconstruct the political dimensions in literature, which, as this paper maintains, marks the emergence of the trend of "redefining literature and art." The core theoretical strategy behind the re-politicalization of literature is to emphasize the inseparability of literature from social context or social relationships, but during the process, literary heterogeneity in terms of politics is not scrutinized with sufficient attention. The paper maintains that the relationship between man and literature may be both a reflection of and a choice from the social relationships. Therefore, the paper concludes that the reconstruction of the political dimensions in literature has to propose the imagined politics of literature if the reconstruction tries to maintain the aesthetic property of literature.

Key words: literature and art, redefinition, political dimension, imagined politics