Corpus-based literary studies refers to the study of features of literary texts, writer's style, and the relationship between literature and the society by using corpus methodology, based on the statistical analysis of the features of literary texts. The studies, which originates from the linguistic turn of literary studies and the rapid development of corpus linguistics, has its research methodology distinct from traditional literary studies, namely corpus methodology, and its unique research areas, such as corpus stylistics and writer attribution. Moreover, the scholars of corpus-based literary studies emphasize descriptive studies and give priority to descriptive integrity and explanatory adequacy, arguing that literary studies should try to reveal the meaning of literary texts, and their connection with socio-cultural factors including ideology. It can thus be held that corpus-based literary studies is not only a methodology but also a research paradigm. This paradigm, on the one hand, attempts to generalize the regularities of literary language and literary creation based on statistical analysis of large amounts of literary texts, thereby overcoming the limitations in traditional literary studies, such as subjectivity and partiality, and making the research results more objective and scientific. On the other hand, while emphasizing the analysis of universal features, such as features of literary language and poetical traditions, the paradigm also pays attention to the study of such idiosyncratic features as literary creativity and writer's style. In addition, the paradigm integrates the internal study of literature with the external study of literature, breaking through the long-standing barrier between the two.  Corpus-based literary studies is essentially empirical studies based on the use of corpora, which is featured by the use of corpus methodology, the combination of quantitative research with qualitative research, and the use of text mining. Its research areas primarily include corpus-based study of literary texts, corpus-based study of writers, corpus-based study of the history of literature and corpus-based study of literary theories. Corpus-based literary studies not only means a significant change in the research methodology of literary studies, but also means a broadened scope in literary studies. The use of corpus methodology in literary studies makes possible multilevel description of the stylistic features of literary texts, and the study of stylistic features of literary texts has gained new momentum accordingly. Additionally, other related research areas have solid foundation as a result of the use of corpus methodology, including the study of the writers' use of creation techniques and styles, the study of the image of characters, and comparative literature. Moreover, the research in the field attempts to verify whether literary texts produced by writers of specific literary schools have been created according to their theories or ideas, thus broadening the scope of the study of literary theories.