Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction - Softcover

Knight, Sabina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019539206X ISBN 13: 9780195392067

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Sabina Knight is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Smith College and the author of The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019539206X
• ISBN 13: 9780195392067
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160