Test of reliability and validity is the spirit of research without which research is worthless. But the case of literary studies (i.e., the analysis of fictional writings like drama, novels, poetry, stories) is different from other studies. so.. How can one make the literary research work reliable and valid?
Let's sketch a scenario... when one is dealing with the analysis of stories (written in different years e.g., 1999, 2003, 2007, 2013, 2016) that represent culture of one specific place. Whatever the culture of the place in 1999, is now not the culture of 2007...further 2007 is different from 2016... How we can make our research authentic..original. Researchers often generalize their research studies by amalgamating different literary pieces of different times and different studies. Why?
Is their any criteria to make a literary study reliable and authentic?
Validity by triangulation of methods. We can also up validity by counting instances of category. Reliability can be increased by ensuring agreement between coders.
I would argue that looking for patterns across times and genres is what lends validity to literary studies. It is also the only way to really understand the progress toward a particular point in the production of a particular kind of texts or themes, particularly since we have nothing really quantifiable in literature.
I think your question is a very good one. One literary scholar who has done very interesting work in this area, including questioning the way we have in the West traditionally evaluated the canon of nineteenth century English literature, is Franco Moretti. His book, Moretti, F., 2013. Distant Reading, London and New York: Verso, brings together a collection of articles he has written on both European and world literature, including Chinese literature. I think you might find something of interest in this collection.
In literary studies it is possible to work with more than one analylist and to look for interrater agreement. It would be arbitrary to make some generalizations depending on one researcher's analyses and conclusions. Interrater agreement, through statistical analyses, gives a score of how much homogeneity, or consensus, there is in the ratings given by judges. But be careful about the refining the tools given to human judges.
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