Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction
Sabina Knight
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 019539206X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Perhaps nowhere else has literature been as conscious a collective endeavor as in China, and China's survival over three thousand years may owe more to its literary traditions than to its political history. This Very Short Introduction tells the story of Chinese literature from antiquity to the present, focusing on the key role literary culture played in supporting social and political concerns. Embracing traditional Chinese understandings of literature as encompassing history and philosophy as well as poetry and poetics, storytelling, drama, and the novel, Sabina Knight discusses the philosophical foundations of literary culture as well as literature's power to address historical trauma and cultivate moral and sensual passions. From ancient historical records through the modernization and globalization of Chinese literature, Knight draws on lively examples to underscore the close relationship between ethics and aesthetics, as well as the diversity of Chinese thought. Knight also illuminates the role of elite patronage; the ways literature has served the interests of specific groups; and questions of canonization, language, nationalism, and cross-cultural understanding. The book includes Chinese characters for names, titles, and key terms.
to conceptual art and cosmology—and will continue to grow in a variety of disciplines. Very Short Introductions available now: ADVERTISING Winston Fletcher AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone AGNOSTICISM Robin Le Poidevin AMERICAN IMMIGRATION David A. Gerber AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS L. Sandy Maisel THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones ANARCHISM Colin Ward ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw ANCIENT GREECE Paul Cartledge ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
In one, a young man journeys to Handan because he admires the Handanites’ gait. He mimics them but cannot learn, and in trying he forgets his own way of walking and has to crawl home. Full of such satirical anecdotes, lyrical allegories, puns, and word plays, the Zhuangzi may be China’s earliest fictional work. A composite probably compiled in the fourth century CE, its first seven “Inner Chapters” may have been written by the skeptical nonconformist Zhuang Zhou (ca. 369–286 BCE). Unlike
history’s great men and their deeds, Sima Qian’s dedication was put to the test when he was accused of libel against the emperor for defending a defeated general. Condemned to castration, rather than take the customary recourse of suicide, he endured the maiming in order to further his father’s mission. Sima’s history—albeit a compilation of earlier historical sources—is pathbreaking for supplementing year-by-year annals with biographies that allow for the characterization of individuals and
Four (1946) describes the desperate conditions of a wartime hospital, an allegory for the treatment of the poor more generally. In Cold Nights (1947), the most powerful of Ba’s twenty novels, a common-law wife abandons her tubercular husband to pursue personal happiness and career fulfillment. Writers on Taiwan, too, pursued liberal humanist themes, particularly during Taiwan’s long decades of martial law (1949–87). As U.S. military and economic support promoted Western literature and
Four (1946) describes the desperate conditions of a wartime hospital, an allegory for the treatment of the poor more generally. In Cold Nights (1947), the most powerful of Ba’s twenty novels, a common-law wife abandons her tubercular husband to pursue personal happiness and career fulfillment. Writers on Taiwan, too, pursued liberal humanist themes, particularly during Taiwan’s long decades of martial law (1949–87). As U.S. military and economic support promoted Western literature and