A History Of Chinese Literature

The Columbia History of Chinese Literature is a comprehensive yet portable guide to China's vast literary traditions. Stretching from earliest times to the present, the text features original contributions by leading specialists working in all genres and periods. Chapters cover poetry, prose, fiction, and drama, and consider such contextual subjects as popular culture, the impact of religion, the role of women, and China's relationship with non-Sinitic languages and peoples. Opening with a major section on the linguistic and intellectual foundations of Chinese literature, the anthology traces the development of forms and movements over time, along with critical trends, and pays particular attention to the premodern canon.

Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese at Harvard University. --Book Jacket.

"A thorough overview and analysis of the literary scene in China during the 1949-1999 period, focusing primarily on fiction, poetry, drama, and prose writing"--Provided by publisher.

Adopting new theoretical perspectives and using updated research, this book by a leading Chinese scholar seeks to provide a coherent, panoramic description of the development of premodern Chinese literature and its major characteristics.

A History of Modern Chinese Fiction was first published in 1961 and has ever since become a classic in the study of twentieth-century Chinese fiction. This volume accounts the development of Chinese fiction from the Literary Revolution in 1917 to the early 60s. C. T. Hsia delved into the works of important writers such as Lu Hsün, Pa Chin, Lao She, Eileen Chang, and Ch'ien Chung-shu. In Hsia's own words, "the literary historian's first task is always the discovery and appraisal of excellence," and in this belief he re-evaluated the important figures in modern Chinese literature, and "discovered" those who had not been given proper attention. To this day, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction is still a must-read for students interested in modern Chinese literature.

Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors, this landmark volume, edited by David Der-wei Wang, explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres, emphasizes Chinese authors’ influence on foreign writers as well as China’s receptivity to outside literary influences, and offers vibrant contrasting voices and points of view.

This book tells the story of Chinese literature, from prehistory to the present, in terms of literary culture's key role in supporting social and political concerns. A welcome guide for teachers, students, and lay readers, Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction honours traditional Chinese understandings of literature as encompassing history and philosophy, as well as the evolution of poetry and poetics, storytelling, drama, and the novel.

The studies contained in this volume arose over the last thirty years. Originally the range of the materials I intended to include in my selection was very much wider. Publishing difficulties, however, have obliged me to curtail them to something less than half the planned content. At first I intended to include all the studies I supposed might be of interest to readers and represent contributi ons still of some significance for research in this domain of Oriental scholarship. When the necessity arose to limit the contents I gave preference to the standpoint of thematic completeness rather than to what would be of interest to the general reader. Thus in this volume I have confined myself to two them atic fields only-Old Chinese literature and studies dealing with mediaeval storytellers' productions-hua-pen. I have excluded the whole complex of historical studies and all studies relating to the new literature. I am now preparing, on the principal historical theme on which I was engaged already in the period of my studies in Prague under Prof. J. Bidlo, and then in 1928 till 1930, with Prof. B. Karlgren in Sweden and Prof. G. Haloun in Halle, in Germany, a more compendious study in which I hope to sum up the results of my research, and I also intend to publish a volume of selected studies dealing with the New Chinese literature at some later date.

“Information” has become a core concept across the disciplines, yet it is still often seen as a unique feature of the Western world that became central only in the digital age. In this book, leading experts turn to China’s textual tradition to show the significance of information for reconceptualizing the work of literary history, from its beginnings to the present moment. Contributors trace the organization of literary information across China’s three millennia of history, examining the forms and practices of information management that have evolved alongside the increasing scale and complexity of textual production. They reimagine literary history as information processing, detailing the many kinds of storage, encoding, sorting, and transmission that constitute and feed back into China’s long and ever-growing cultural tradition. The volume features state-of-the-field essays on all major forms of literary information management, from graphs to internet literature, and from commentaries to literary museums and archives. By shifting focus from individual works and their authors to the informatic schemata of literature, it identifies three scales of information management—the word, the document, and the collection—and surveys the forms that operate at each level, such as the dictionary, the anthology, and the library. Literary Information in China is a groundbreaking work that provides a systematic and innovative reassessment of literary history with implications that extend beyond the particular Chinese context, revealing how informatic practices shape literary tradition.