History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 1

Previous◀

History_of_Chinese_Literature

NextChapter 2 ▶

Chapter 1: Prologue — What Is "Chinese Literature"? Definitions, Boundaries, and the Sinophone Sphere

1. Introduction: The Problem of Definition

Any attempt to write a comprehensive history of Chinese literature must begin with a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, is "Chinese literature"? The question is deceptive because each of its three components — "Chinese," "literature," and the relationship between them — is contested, culturally specific, and historically variable. Is "Chinese literature" the literature produced within the borders of the People's Republic of China? The literature written in the Chinese language, regardless of where its authors reside? The literature of ethnically Chinese people, however they define themselves? Or is it a tradition defined not by geography, ethnicity, or even language alone, but by a shared set of aesthetic values, canonical texts, and literary conventions stretching back three millennia?

The answer one gives to this question determines what kind of history one writes — and what one includes or excludes. A history organized around the territorial boundaries of the modern Chinese state will inevitably marginalize the rich literary traditions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and the global Chinese diaspora. A history organized around language will need to grapple with the fact that "Chinese" is not one language but a family of related but mutually unintelligible varieties, and that much of what is conventionally called "Chinese literature" was written in classical Chinese (文言, wenyan), a literary language as different from modern Mandarin as Latin is from Italian. A history organized around ethnicity will struggle to account for the many non-Han peoples — Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, Zhuang, Miao, and dozens of others — who have lived within the borders of China and contributed to its literary culture, often in languages other than Chinese.

These are not merely academic quibbles. They touch on some of the most sensitive political and cultural questions of our time: the relationship between the PRC and Taiwan, the status of Hong Kong's cultural autonomy, the place of ethnic minorities within the Chinese nation, and the meaning of "Chineseness" in a globalized world. Any responsible history of Chinese literature must acknowledge these tensions, even if it cannot resolve them.

2. Beyond the PRC: Chinese Literature as a Transnational Phenomenon

For much of the twentieth century, histories of Chinese literature were implicitly or explicitly national histories, organized around the territorial boundaries and political narratives of the Chinese nation-state — whether the Republic of China (1912–1949) or the People's Republic (1949–present). This approach had the advantage of simplicity: it allowed scholars to tell a coherent story of literary development within a defined political and cultural space. But it also had serious limitations.

The most obvious limitation is the exclusion of Taiwan. After the Kuomintang's retreat to the island in 1949, Taiwan developed a literary culture that was at once deeply rooted in the Chinese classical tradition and profoundly shaped by the island's unique historical experience — Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), the trauma of the February 28 Incident (1947), decades of martial law under a one-party state, and the gradual emergence of a vibrant democratic society. Taiwan's literary achievements are formidable: from the modernist poetry of Ji Xian (紀弦), Ya Xian (瘂弦), and Luo Fu (洛夫) to the fiction of Bai Xianyong (白先勇), Wang Wenxing (王文興), and Li Ang (李昂), from the nativist literature of Huang Chunming (黃春明) and Chen Yingzhen (陳映真) to the indigenous Austronesian literary voices that have emerged since the 1980s. To exclude this body of work from a history of "Chinese literature" would be to impoverish the field beyond measure.

Hong Kong presents a different but equally compelling case. Under British colonial rule from 1842 to 1997, Hong Kong developed a literary culture characterized by cosmopolitan hybridity, commercial dynamism, and a unique linguistic situation in which Cantonese, English, and written Chinese coexisted and interpenetrated. Hong Kong literature — from the martial arts fiction of Jin Yong (金庸) and Liang Yusheng (梁羽生) to the modernist experiments of Liu Yichang (劉以鬯) and Xi Xi (西西), from the Cantonese-inflected prose of Dung Kai-cheung (董啟章) to the protest poetry of the 2014 and 2019 movements — occupies a distinctive position that cannot be adequately understood within the framework of PRC literary history alone.

The Chinese diaspora adds yet another dimension. Chinese-language literature has been produced in Southeast Asia — particularly Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines — for centuries. The nanyang (南洋, "Southern Ocean") literary tradition, rooted in the experiences of Chinese migrants and their descendants in the Malay Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, constitutes a substantial and artistically significant body of work that is neither fully "Chinese" (in the sense of belonging to the literary culture of China proper) nor fully "local" (in the sense of belonging exclusively to the national literatures of Malaysia, Singapore, or Indonesia). To this must be added the growing body of Chinese-language literature produced in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australasia by immigrant writers, sojourners, and members of established Chinese communities.

3. Sinophone Studies and the Critique of "Chinese"

The most systematic attempt to rethink the boundaries of "Chinese literature" in recent decades has come from the field of Sinophone studies, most influentially articulated by the literary scholar Shu-mei Shih (史書美). In her foundational work Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007) and the subsequent volume Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013), Shih proposed the concept of the "Sinophone" as an alternative to "Chinese" for describing the literary and cultural production of Chinese-language communities outside — and, in some formulations, inside — the People's Republic of China.

The term "Sinophone" is modeled on "Francophone" and "Anglophone," which in postcolonial studies refer to the literary and cultural production in French and English, respectively, of communities shaped by the legacy of French and British colonialism. By analogy, the Sinophone designates the diverse literary and cultural practices of communities that use Sinitic languages — not only Mandarin but also Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, and other varieties — in contexts shaped by histories of Chinese migration, colonialism, and cultural influence.

Shih's approach is explicitly anti-sinocentric. She argues that the concept of "Chinese literature" has been used to enforce a cultural hierarchy in which the PRC (and, implicitly, Beijing Mandarin) occupies the center and all other Chinese-language literary cultures are relegated to the periphery. The Sinophone concept challenges this hierarchy by treating each community's literary production as worthy of study on its own terms, without reference to a putative Chinese center. "The Sinophone is a place-based, everyday practice of living and speaking in various Sinitic languages," Shih writes, one that should be understood "not as the extension of China or Chineseness but as its detachment and departure."

The Sinophone approach has been enormously productive, opening up new areas of inquiry and challenging long-standing assumptions. It has also provoked substantial criticism. Some scholars have objected that the analogy with Francophone and Anglophone studies is imperfect, since Chinese migration and cultural influence in Southeast Asia and elsewhere cannot be straightforwardly equated with Western colonialism. Others have argued that Shih's framework, by insisting on the "detachment" of the Sinophone from China, risks obscuring the deep historical and cultural continuities that connect Chinese-language literary communities across the world. The historian and literary scholar David Der-wei Wang (王德威) has offered an alternative formulation — "Sinophone/Chinese literatures" — that attempts to hold these tensions in productive balance without resolving them prematurely.

For the purposes of this history, we adopt an inclusive approach. "Chinese literature" is understood to encompass literary works written in any Sinitic language or variety, produced by authors of any ethnic or national background, in any geographical location, that participate in the broader Chinese literary tradition — defined not by political boundaries but by shared canonical texts, aesthetic values, generic conventions, and intertextual relationships. This definition is necessarily imperfect: it is too broad in some respects (it includes works that their authors might not wish to call "Chinese") and too narrow in others (it excludes the rich oral and written literatures of non-Sinitic-speaking peoples within China's borders, such as Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian literature). But it has the advantage of reflecting the actual complexity of the phenomena we are trying to describe.

4. The Concept of Wen (文): Text, Pattern, Civilization

No discussion of what constitutes "Chinese literature" can avoid the concept of wen (文). The character wen is one of the most semantically rich in the Chinese language. Its original meaning, visible in the earliest oracle bone inscriptions, appears to have been "pattern" or "marking" — perhaps referring to tattoos, to decorative designs on pottery or bronze vessels, or to the natural patterns of the cosmos. From this concrete meaning, wen developed an extraordinary range of abstract senses: "writing," "text," "literature," "culture," "civilization," "refinement," and "the civil" (as opposed to wu 武, "the martial"). The compound wenhua (文化) means "culture"; wenming (文明) means "civilization"; wenxue (文学) means "literature"; wenzhang (文章) means "essay" or "written composition."

The breadth of wen has profound implications for how "literature" is conceived within the Chinese tradition. In the Western tradition, at least since the Romantic period, "literature" has tended to be defined in terms of aesthetic autonomy — literature is writing that is valued primarily for its artistic or imaginative qualities, as distinct from writing that serves a practical, informational, or didactic purpose. This definition, which underlies the modern Western distinction between "literature" and other forms of writing, has no exact counterpart in the Chinese tradition.

In the classical Chinese understanding, wen encompasses far more than what the modern Western concept of "literature" includes. The Wen xin diao long (文心雕龙, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), written by Liu Xie (刘勰) around 501 CE — the most important work of Chinese literary criticism — devotes its opening chapter ("Yuandao" 原道, "The Origin in the Dao") to arguing that wen is a manifestation of the fundamental pattern (dao 道) that underlies the universe. The patterns of the stars, the markings on the shells of tortoises, the veins in jade, the colors of flowers — all are wen. Human writing is simply the highest and most refined expression of this cosmic patterning.

This cosmological understanding of wen meant that in traditional China, the boundary between "literature" and other forms of writing was far more permeable than in the modern West. Historical writing, philosophical treatises, memorials to the throne, personal letters, prefaces to books, epitaphs, and administrative documents were all considered forms of wen and were evaluated by the same aesthetic criteria — clarity, elegance, rhetorical force, moral seriousness — as poetry and fictional narrative. The great anthologies of Chinese literature, from the sixth-century Wen xuan (文选, Selections of Refined Literature) compiled by Xiao Tong (萧统) to the eighteenth-century Guwen ci lei zuan (古文辞类纂), routinely included edicts, memorials, letters, prefaces, and eulogies alongside poetry and fu (赋, rhyme-prose).

The modern Chinese concept of wenxue (文学, "literature"), by contrast, is largely a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Chinese intellectuals, influenced by Western and Japanese models, began to draw sharper distinctions between "literature" (understood as imaginative or aesthetic writing) and other forms of discourse. The May Fourth Movement (1919) and the literary revolution it spawned completed this transformation, establishing a concept of "literature" that was much closer to the modern Western sense of the term. Yet the older, broader understanding of wen has never entirely disappeared, and it continues to influence Chinese literary culture in ways that can be surprising to Western observers.

5. Genre Systems: Chinese and Western

The difference between the Chinese and Western conceptions of "literature" is reflected in their respective genre systems. Western literary theory, from Aristotle onward, has traditionally organized literature into three major genres: epic (narrative), dramatic, and lyric. This tripartite division, though often criticized and revised, remains foundational to Western literary study. Chinese literary theory developed a very different system of generic classification, one that reflects the distinctive features of Chinese literary culture.

The most fundamental generic distinction in traditional Chinese literature is between shi (诗, "poetry") and wen (文, "prose" — here used in a narrower sense than the cosmic wen discussed above). Within these two broad categories, Chinese critics identified dozens of specific genres, each with its own conventions, aesthetic criteria, and social functions. The major poetic genres include:

• Shi (诗): the oldest and most prestigious form of Chinese poetry, exemplified by the Shijing (Book of Songs) and the five- and seven-character regulated verse (lushi 律诗) of the Tang dynasty.
• Ci (词): lyric poetry written to musical tunes, which reached its highest development in the Song dynasty.
• Qu (曲): song-lyrics associated with the drama and sanqu (散曲, independent songs) of the Yuan dynasty.
• Fu (赋): a form of rhymed prose or "rhapsody," characterized by elaborate description and rhetorical amplification, which flourished in the Han dynasty.
• Sao (骚): the tradition of lyric poetry inspired by the Chuci (Elegies of Chu), particularly the works attributed to Qu Yuan.

The major prose genres include:

• Lun (论): discursive essay or treatise.
• Shu (书): letter or epistle.
• Xu (序): preface.
• Ji (记): record or account (including travel accounts, biographical sketches, and commemorative inscriptions).
• Zhuan (传): biography.
• Biao (表): memorial to the throne.
• Ming (铭): inscription.
• Lei (诔): eulogy for the dead.

Two genres that occupy a central place in Western literary culture — drama and prose fiction — were traditionally regarded with much less prestige in China. Drama (xiqu 戏曲) and vernacular fiction (xiaoshuo 小说) were considered popular entertainment, unworthy of serious scholarly attention, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Chinese reformers and revolutionaries, influenced by Western models, began to argue for the literary and social importance of the novel and the theater. The irony is that some of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature — the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, the Jin Ping Mei, and above all the Dream of the Red Chamber — belong to these traditionally disdained genres.

This history attempts to do justice to the full range of Chinese literary genres, including those that do not fit neatly into Western categories. It treats historical writing, philosophical prose, and epistolary literature as integral parts of the literary tradition, while also giving full attention to the drama and fiction that have captivated Chinese readers for centuries.

6. The Tension between Language-Based and Nation-Based Definitions

The question of whether "Chinese literature" should be defined by language or by nation is not merely theoretical; it has practical consequences for how literary histories are organized, what texts are included, and whose voices are heard.

A nation-based definition ties Chinese literature to the political entity called "China" — whether that means the PRC, the ROC, or some broader civilizational entity. This approach has the advantage of providing a clear institutional and political framework, and it aligns with the way literature is taught in Chinese universities, where the standard curriculum distinguishes between Zhongguo wenxue (中国文学, "Chinese literature," meaning the literature of China) and waiguo wenxue (外国文学, "foreign literature"). But it creates awkward problems. Is the literature of Taiwan "Chinese literature" or "foreign literature"? What about the Chinese-language literature of Malaysia and Singapore? And what about the centuries of Chinese literary production in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, where classical Chinese served as a literary lingua franca analogous to Latin in medieval Europe?

A language-based definition avoids some of these problems but creates others. If "Chinese literature" means "literature written in Chinese," then we must include the classical Chinese poetry written by Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese scholars over many centuries — a corpus that is vast, sophisticated, and deeply integrated into the broader Chinese literary tradition. The Korean poet Ch'oe Ch'i-won (崔致远, 857–?), who passed the Tang dynasty civil service examination and served as an official in China, wrote poetry in Chinese that is indistinguishable in quality and style from that of his Chinese contemporaries. Japanese kanshi (漢詩, Chinese-style poetry) constitutes a major literary tradition in its own right. The Vietnamese scholar Nguyen Trai (阮廌, 1380–1442) wrote masterful prose and poetry in classical Chinese. Are these works "Chinese literature"?

The question becomes even more complex when we consider that classical Chinese (wenyan) and modern vernacular Chinese (baihua) are, in many respects, different languages. A scholar who can read Du Fu's poetry in the original may be unable to read a contemporary Chinese novel without significant effort, and vice versa. The literary revolution of the May Fourth period, which established baihua as the standard medium of literary expression, represented a linguistic rupture of enormous significance — arguably more radical than the transition from Latin to the vernacular languages in European literature, since wenyan continued to be used (and understood) alongside baihua well into the twentieth century.

For these reasons, no single definition of "Chinese literature" is fully satisfactory. This history proceeds on the pragmatic assumption that "Chinese literature" is best understood as a family-resemblance concept — a cluster of overlapping traditions connected by shared languages, canonical texts, aesthetic values, and intertextual relationships, rather than by any single defining criterion. The core of this tradition is the literary culture that developed in the Chinese heartland from the Shang dynasty to the present, but its boundaries are permeable and its connections to other literary cultures — Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and, in the modern period, global — are an essential part of the story.

7. Periodization: How to Divide Three Thousand Years

Every literary history must make choices about periodization — how to divide the continuous flow of literary creation into manageable units. These choices are never neutral: they reflect assumptions about what drives literary change, what constitutes a significant turning point, and how literature relates to broader historical processes.

The most common periodization schemes for Chinese literary history fall into three broad types:

Dynastic periodization organizes literary history according to the succession of ruling dynasties: Zhou literature, Qin-Han literature, Six Dynasties literature, Tang literature, Song literature, and so on. This is the oldest and most traditional scheme, and it remains dominant in Chinese literary historiography. Its advantages are clear: the dynastic framework is well established, easy to remember, and corresponds to real political and institutional changes that affected literary production. Its disadvantages are equally clear: dynastic boundaries do not always correspond to significant literary changes (the transition from Sui to Tang, for example, was far less significant for literary history than the transition from early Tang to high Tang), and the scheme implicitly subordinates literary history to political history.

Genre-based periodization organizes literary history around the rise and fall of major literary genres: the age of the Shijing, the age of the Chuci, the age of the fu, the age of Tang poetry, the age of Song ci, the age of Yuan drama, the age of Ming-Qing fiction, and so on. This approach, which has antecedents in traditional Chinese literary criticism (the saying "Tang poetry, Song ci, Yuan qu, Ming-Qing fiction" is a compressed version of it), has the advantage of keeping literary form at the center of attention. But it risks oversimplification: no dynasty was ever dominated by a single genre, and the "rise and fall" narrative obscures the complex processes of generic transformation, hybridization, and coexistence that characterize actual literary history.

Conceptual periodization organizes literary history around large-scale intellectual, social, or aesthetic transformations. For example, one might divide Chinese literary history into an "age of oral literature" (before writing), an "age of aristocratic literature" (Zhou through Six Dynasties), an "age of examination literature" (Tang through Qing), and an "age of mass literature" (modern period). Or one might follow the scheme proposed by Stephen Owen, who distinguishes between an era in which literature was conceived as the expression of a collective or communal voice (the Shijing), an era in which it became the expression of individual personality and emotion (the Chuci and after), and an era in which it was theorized as an autonomous aesthetic domain (the Six Dynasties and after).

This history adopts a pragmatic hybrid approach. The overall structure follows the familiar dynastic and chronological framework, since this is the most widely understood and the most convenient for reference purposes. But within each period, the discussion is organized thematically and generically, and we draw attention to the continuities and transformations that cut across dynastic boundaries. The nine parts of this work correspond roughly to major phases of Chinese literary history, but they are defined by intellectual, aesthetic, and social criteria rather than purely political ones.

8. Key Scholarly Traditions and Reference Works

The modern academic study of Chinese literature is a vast enterprise, pursued by scholars in China, Japan, Korea, Europe, North America, and Australasia. A brief survey of the major scholarly traditions and reference works will help orient the reader.

The Chinese tradition of literary historiography is the oldest and richest. The first comprehensive histories of Chinese literature were produced in the early twentieth century, under the influence of Western models: Lin Chuanjia's (林传甲) Zhongguo wenxue shi (1904), Xie Wuliang's (谢无量) Zhongguo da wenxue shi (1918), and Hu Shi's (胡适) pathbreaking Baihua wenxue shi (1928), which argued for the centrality of vernacular literature. The most influential mid-twentieth-century history was Liu Dajie's (刘大杰) Zhongguo wenxue fazhan shi (History of the Development of Chinese Literature, 1941, revised 1957–1962), which applied a Marxist framework to literary periodization. In the PRC since the 1980s, the standard reference has been Yuan Xingpei's (袁行霈) multi-volume Zhongguo wenxue shi (2005), supplemented by numerous specialized histories of individual genres and periods.

In the Western tradition, the most important comprehensive histories include Herbert A. Giles's A History of Chinese Literature (1901), the first book-length history of Chinese literature in English; the chapters on literature in the various volumes of The Cambridge History of China; and, most recently and most authoritatively, the two-volume Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (2010), edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, which represents the current state of the art in English-language scholarship. David Der-wei Wang's A New Literary History of Modern China (2017), organized as a series of dated entries rather than a continuous narrative, offers an innovative approach to the modern period. Victor Mair's Columbia History of Chinese Literature (2001) provides a comprehensive single-volume treatment with contributions from dozens of specialists.

For translated primary texts, the essential reference is the multi-volume Wen xuan translation by David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, published by Princeton University Press, which makes the most important Chinese literary anthology accessible in annotated English translation. Stephen Owen's An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (1996) remains the best single-volume anthology in English. For individual genres, the reader is referred to the specialized studies cited in each chapter of this history.

Japanese scholarship on Chinese literature (known in Japan as Chugoku bungaku 中国文学) constitutes a major tradition in its own right, characterized by meticulous textual scholarship and innovative literary analysis. The multi-volume Chugoku bungaku shi edited by Maeno Naoaki (前野直彬) and the works of Yoshikawa Kojiro (吉川幸次郎) on Tang and Song poetry remain essential references. European sinology, particularly in France and Germany, has also made fundamental contributions, from Paul Demieville and Jacques Gernet in France to Wolfgang Kubin's ambitious multi-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur (2002–2013) in Germany.

9. Scope and Aims of This History

This history aspires to be comprehensive in scope, covering Chinese literary history from its earliest origins in oral tradition and oracle bone inscriptions to the digital literature and AI-assisted writing of the twenty-first century. It treats poetry, prose, drama, fiction, literary criticism, and essayistic writing as equally important components of the literary tradition. It gives sustained attention to the material conditions of literary production — the technologies of writing, printing, and publishing; the institutions of education, examination, and patronage; the markets for books and periodicals — as well as to the formal and aesthetic dimensions of literary works.

The history is organized into nine parts and thirty-five chapters. Part I (Chapters 1–6) covers the foundations and origins of Chinese literature, from the prehistoric period through the Warring States era. Part II (Chapters 7–8) treats the classical imperial tradition of the Han through Six Dynasties period. Parts III–V (Chapters 9–19) cover the major periods of imperial Chinese literature from the Tang through the late Qing. Parts VI–VII (Chapters 20–24) address the literary revolution of the twentieth century and literature under socialism. Part VIII (Chapters 25–28) explores contemporary and global Sinophone literature. Part IX (Chapters 29–35) takes up cross-cutting themes — the poetic tradition, literary criticism, censorship, translation, material culture, digital literature, and Chinese literature in world perspective.

Throughout, we aim to balance detailed textual analysis with broad historical and cultural contextualization. We treat Chinese literature not as an isolated tradition but as one that has always been shaped by contact with other cultures — Central Asian, Indian, Mongol, Manchu, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and, in the modern period, Western. We pay particular attention to the voices of women writers, ethnic minority authors, and other groups whose contributions have been marginalized in traditional literary histories. And we take seriously the challenge of writing literary history in a way that is both scholarly and readable — that conveys the aesthetic power and human significance of the works we discuss, as well as their historical and cultural contexts.

The present chapter has attempted to map the conceptual terrain. In the chapters that follow, we turn to the literature itself — beginning, as we must, with the time before writing, when Chinese literature existed only as the spoken and sung word.

References

Previous◀

History_of_Chinese_Literature

NextChapter 2 ▶