Abstract: Cosmopolitanism, as an important philosophical term, has aroused more and more interest from the scholars in the fields of culture and literature. The reflection of cosmopolitanism in literature is world literature. Goethe’s conception of world literature stresses cultural communication among different nations. Emerson’s interpretation focuses on the universal ethics. Based on Siao Yu by Yan Gelin, this paper tries to analyze the author’s understanding of the universal ethics, and her discussion of the mutual communication and fusion of various races and cultures, so as to probe into the impact of cosmopolitanism on literary works.