Abstract
Presumably there is more than one tradition of literary historiography in the world. The Western tradition is, of course, familiar to scholars. Is there also a Chinese tradition? On the face of it, hardly, for the first History of Chinese Literature, so-called, was published only in 1904. And what has happened since then seems mainly a tale of succession of foreign influences—Japanese, English, French, American and, finally, Soviet—that Chinese literary historians have been subjected to, so that to this day there is no history of Chinese literature published in China, or elsewhere in the world, for that matter, that is found generally acceptable to most Chinese scholars. Their main objection to many of these “histories” is that there is little that is distinctly Chinese in them.
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Notes
- 1.
林传甲, 《中国文学史》, 1904。(广州存珍阁, 甲寅年二月重校印行)
- 2.
Vincent Yu-chung Shih, trans. The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. First published in 1959. Bilingual ed. (Hong Kong: The Chinese UP, 1983.)
- 3.
David Nichol Smith, Warton’s History of English Poetry. British Academy Warton Lecture, 1929, p. 14.
- 4.
Thus Xie He (谢赫) spoke of fenggu as an outstanding quality of some artists in his Critical Account of Early Paintings (《古画品录》). Yuan Ang (袁昂) in his Critique on Calligraphy (《书评》) used the two words separately to distinguish the achievements of individual calligraphers.
- 5.
That Liu was a conscious artist in his use of balanced sentences can be further seen in the fact that he devoted a whole chapter of his book to a discussion of them. He would divide balanced sentences into four types, thus: “故丽辞之体, 凡有四对: 言对为易, 事对为难; 反对为优, 正对为劣。” (《丽辞》)
- 6.
A critic is reported to hold an opposite view, maintaining that here Du Fu was condemning, not defending, the four masters. However, this does not seem to square with Du’s general position in regard to the ornate poetry of the early Tang, which he had defended in other poems.
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© 2015 Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Wang, Z. (2015). Literary History: Chinese Beginnings. In: Degrees of Affinity. China Academic Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45475-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45475-6_1
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