History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 30

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History of Chinese Literature

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Chapter 30: Chinese Literary Criticism and Aesthetics

1. Introduction: A Tradition of Reflection on Literature

The Chinese literary tradition is distinguished not only by the richness and the variety of its literary production — its poetry, its fiction, its drama, its essays — but also by the depth and the sophistication of the critical and aesthetic reflection that has accompanied that production from its earliest beginnings. From the "Great Preface" to the Shijing, which was probably composed in the first century BCE and which articulated the foundational principles of the Confucian approach to poetry, to the complex and eclectic critical theories of the twenty-first century, the Chinese tradition has produced a body of literary criticism and aesthetic theory that is one of the most substantial and one of the most intellectually ambitious in the world.

The history of Chinese literary criticism is, in many respects, a history of the attempt to answer a small number of fundamental questions — questions that are, in their essence, the same questions that have animated literary criticism in every culture: What is literature? What is it for? What makes a literary work good? How should a reader approach a literary work? What is the relationship between literature and morality, between literature and politics, between literature and the individual personality of the author, between literature and the nature of reality? These questions have been answered differently by different critics at different periods in Chinese history, and the diversity of the answers that have been proposed reflects both the richness of the Chinese literary tradition and the seriousness with which Chinese scholars and writers have engaged with the problems of literary art.

But the Chinese tradition of literary criticism is not merely a Chinese version of Western literary criticism. It has its own distinctive categories, its own distinctive methods, and its own distinctive assumptions about the nature of literature and the purposes of criticism — assumptions that are rooted in the philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, in the aesthetic traditions of Chinese painting, calligraphy, and music, and in the distinctive features of the Chinese language and the Chinese literary system. Any adequate account of Chinese literary criticism must attend to these distinctive features and must resist the temptation to reduce Chinese critical concepts to their Western equivalents — a temptation that has led many Western scholars, and some Chinese scholars trained in Western critical traditions, to misunderstand or to undervalue the achievements of the Chinese critical tradition.

2. The "Great Preface" and the Confucian Foundations of Literary Criticism

The "Great Preface" (大序, Daxu) to the Shijing — also known as the Mao Preface (毛诗序, Maoshi xu), because it was transmitted as part of the Mao recension of the Shijing — is the earliest and the most influential single text in the history of Chinese literary criticism. Its opening passage articulates, in compressed and pregnant form, a theory of poetry that would remain the foundation of Chinese poetic criticism for more than two thousand years:

"Poetry is where the intent of the heart goes. What is in the heart is intent; when it is expressed in words, it is poetry. Feelings stir within and take shape in words. When words are not enough, one sighs; when sighing is not enough, one sings; when singing is not enough, one unconsciously dances with one's hands and feet." (诗者，志之所之也。在心为志，发言为诗。情动于中而形于言，言之不足，故嗟叹之；嗟叹之不足，故永歌之；永歌之不足，不知手之舞之、足之蹈之也。)

This passage establishes several principles that are fundamental to the Chinese understanding of poetry. First, it defines poetry as the expression of zhi (志, "intent," "purpose," or "will") — a concept that links poetry to the inner life of the individual and that makes the poet's moral and emotional state the source and the guarantor of poetic value. Second, it places poetry in a continuum of expressive acts — words, sighs, songs, dances — that suggests that poetry is not merely a literary form but a natural and spontaneous mode of human expression, rooted in the body and in the emotions as well as in the mind. Third, it implicitly establishes a connection between poetry and music, between the verbal and the performative dimensions of poetic expression, that would remain central to the Chinese understanding of poetry.

The "Great Preface" also articulates the political and social dimensions of the Confucian understanding of poetry — the belief that poetry is not merely a vehicle for personal expression but a medium through which the moral health of a society can be gauged and through which the relationship between ruler and ruled can be negotiated. "The airs of the states express the feelings of the people," the "Great Preface" declares; "therefore, when the moral Way prevails and the government is harmonious, the people rejoice and their songs express their joy; when the government is corrupt and the people suffer, they grieve and their songs express their sorrow." This principle — that poetry is a barometer of social and political conditions, and that the interpretation of poetry requires an understanding of the historical circumstances in which it was produced — became one of the most important and most enduring principles of Chinese literary criticism, informing the interpretive practices of critics from the Han dynasty to the present day.

The Confucian understanding of poetry, as articulated in the "Great Preface" and as elaborated by subsequent Confucian critics, has been both enriched and challenged by the contributions of the Daoist and Buddhist intellectual traditions. The Daoist tradition — with its emphasis on spontaneity (自然, ziran), non-action (无为, wuwei), and the limitations of language as a vehicle for the expression of ultimate truth — contributed a set of aesthetic values that complemented and sometimes contradicted the Confucian emphasis on moral purpose and social function. The Daoist influence on Chinese literary criticism can be seen in the ideal of pingdan (平淡, "blandness" or "plainness") — the belief that the highest art is art that appears artless, that conceals its craft behind a surface of simplicity and naturalness — and in the suspicion of ornament, artifice, and rhetorical virtuosity that runs as a counter-current through the history of Chinese aesthetic thought.

3. Cao Pi, Lu Ji, and the Emergence of Literary Theory

The period from the late Han dynasty through the Six Dynasties (roughly the third through the sixth centuries CE) witnessed the emergence of literary criticism as an independent intellectual enterprise — a discipline with its own methods, its own categories, and its own concerns, distinct from the broader fields of philosophy, history, and political thought in which earlier reflections on literature had been embedded.

Cao Pi (曹丕, 187–226), the Wei dynasty emperor who was also a poet and a literary patron, produced one of the earliest Chinese essays devoted specifically to the analysis of literary composition: the Discourse on Literature (典论·论文, Dianlun · Lunwen). In this brief but influential essay, Cao Pi identified qi (气, "vital breath" or "vital force") as the essential quality that distinguishes great literature from mediocre literature: "Literature is a matter of vital force (qi), and vital force has its purity and its turbidity, which cannot be acquired by effort" (文以气为主，气之清浊有体，不可力强而致). This concept — that literary quality is a function of the writer's innate vital force, which manifests itself in the distinctive texture and the distinctive energy of his prose or verse — became one of the most important and most enduring concepts in Chinese literary criticism, and it established the principle that literary criticism is, in part, an assessment of the personality and the temperament of the writer as they are expressed in his work.

Lu Ji (陆机, 261–303) produced a more sustained and more systematic analysis of the creative process in his Rhyme-prose on Literature (文赋, Wen fu, c. 300) — a work that is remarkable both for its literary quality (it is itself a masterpiece of the fu form) and for its analytical insight. Lu Ji's Wen fu describes the process of literary composition with a psychological precision and a phenomenological subtlety that anticipate modern theories of creativity. He describes the writer's initial effort to empty the mind of distractions and to achieve a state of concentrated receptivity; the mysterious moment of inspiration when ideas and images begin to flow; the struggle to find the right words and the right forms to embody the writer's vision; and the frustration and the exhilaration that attend the creative process. Lu Ji's account of literary creation is notable for its emphasis on the organic unity of literary form and literary content — the principle that the form of a literary work is not an external container into which content is poured but an integral aspect of the work's meaning and its aesthetic effect.

Zhong Rong (钟嵘, c. 468–518) produced the Gradations of Poetry (诗品, Shipin) — a work that ranked 122 poets of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties periods into three grades (upper, middle, and lower) and that offered brief critical evaluations of each poet's work. Zhong Rong's critical method — which combined biographical information, stylistic analysis, and assessments of literary influence and affiliation — established a model for Chinese literary criticism that would be followed, with variations, for centuries. His insistence on ziran (naturalness) and his criticism of excessive allusion and ornament articulated aesthetic values that would recur throughout the history of Chinese critical thought.

4. Liu Xie and the Wenxin Diaolong

The most comprehensive and the most intellectually ambitious work of literary criticism produced in the Chinese tradition before the modern period is the Wenxin diaolong (文心雕龙, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), written by Liu Xie (刘勰, c. 465–c. 521) around 501–502 CE. The Wenxin diaolong is a monumental work of fifty chapters that addresses every major aspect of literary composition, literary form, and literary history — from the metaphysical foundations of literature (its relationship to the Dao and to the patterns of nature) to the practical techniques of style, structure, and revision — in a systematic and philosophically rigorous manner that has no parallel in the Western critical tradition until at least the eighteenth century.

Liu Xie's literary theory is grounded in a cosmological vision that links literature to the fundamental patterns of the natural universe. "Literature is the expression of the patterns (wen) of the mind-heart (xin)," Liu Xie writes, "just as the natural world expresses the patterns (wen) of Heaven and Earth." The Chinese word wen (文) — which means, simultaneously, "pattern," "writing," "literature," and "civilization" — is the key term in Liu Xie's theory, and his use of this term establishes a fundamental connection between literary art, natural pattern, and cosmic order that distinguishes his theory from any Western theory of literature. For Liu Xie, literature is not an arbitrary human invention but a natural and necessary mode of expression that participates in the same patterning impulse that produces the markings of animals, the veining of minerals, the branching of rivers, and the constellations of the stars.

The Wenxin diaolong addresses an extraordinary range of topics. Its early chapters discuss the relationship between literature and the Confucian classics, the various genres of Chinese literary composition (poetry, rhapsody, memorial, proclamation, letter, eulogy, inscription, and many others), and the historical development of each genre. Its middle chapters discuss the techniques and the principles of literary composition — including the use of allusion, the relationship between form and content, the principles of rhythm and tonal patterning, the use of parallelism and antithesis, and the role of emotion in literary creation. Its later chapters discuss the qualities that distinguish great literature from mediocre literature — including fenggu (风骨, "wind and bone"), a concept that denotes the combination of emotional power ("wind") and structural strength ("bone") that characterizes the most impressive literary works — and offer practical advice on the process of literary composition and revision.

Liu Xie's Wenxin diaolong remained an influential and widely studied work throughout the subsequent history of Chinese literary criticism, and it has attracted particular attention from modern scholars who have recognized in it a theoretical sophistication and a systematic ambition that are rare in any critical tradition. The work has been translated into English, Japanese, Korean, and several European languages, and it is increasingly recognized as one of the masterpieces of world literary criticism.

5. Sikong Tu and the "Twenty-Four Modes of Poetry"

Sikong Tu (司空图, 837–908), a poet and critic of the late Tang dynasty, produced a work of poetic criticism — the Twenty-Four Modes of Poetry (二十四诗品, Ershisi shipin) — that represents one of the most distinctive and one of the most characteristically Chinese contributions to the tradition of literary aesthetics. The Twenty-Four Modes of Poetry consists of twenty-four short prose-poems, each of which describes a particular aesthetic quality or "mode" (品, pin) of poetry — qualities such as xionghan (雄浑, "grandeur and vigor"), chongdan (冲淡, "washed and bland"), xianyi (纤秾, "delicate and rich"), jingjian (劲健, "forceful and robust"), qinqi (清奇, "clear and strange"), hanxu (含蓄, "reserved and implicit"), ziran (自然, "natural"), and kuangda (旷达, "expansive and open").

What is remarkable about Sikong Tu's work is its method: instead of defining these aesthetic qualities in abstract, analytical terms, as a Western critic might do, Sikong Tu evokes them through a series of images, metaphors, and suggestive descriptions that are themselves literary performances — prose-poems that embody the aesthetic qualities they describe. The mode of "washed and bland" (冲淡, chongdan), for example, is evoked through images of a hermit drinking from a spring, of autumn water in a still pool, of white clouds drifting over mountains — images that suggest, rather than define, the quality of luminous simplicity and quiet depth that Sikong Tu associates with this mode. The mode of "reserved and implicit" (含蓄, hanxu) is evoked through images of a figure glimpsed through mist, of words that stop short but whose meaning continues — images that suggest the aesthetic principle that the most powerful poetry is poetry that leaves much unsaid, that relies on suggestion and implication rather than on explicit statement.

Sikong Tu's method of criticism — which operates through evocation rather than analysis, through the creation of aesthetic atmospheres rather than the formulation of theoretical propositions — is deeply rooted in the Daoist and Chan Buddhist traditions, which emphasize the limitations of discursive language and the superiority of direct, intuitive apprehension over analytical understanding. It is also a method that is uniquely suited to the criticism of poetry — a literary form that operates, at its finest, through the same processes of evocation, suggestion, and imaginative resonance that Sikong Tu employs in his criticism. The Twenty-Four Modes of Poetry has been enormously influential in the subsequent history of Chinese literary criticism, and its concepts and its methods continue to inform the way Chinese readers think and talk about poetry.

6. Yan Yu and the Canglang Shihua

Yan Yu (严羽, c. 1191–1245), a critic of the Southern Song dynasty, produced a work of poetic criticism — the Canglang shihua (沧浪诗话, Canglang's Remarks on Poetry) — that was one of the most influential and one of the most controversial critical texts in the Chinese tradition. Yan Yu's central argument was that the poetry of the High Tang (盛唐, Sheng Tang) — the poetry of Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and their contemporaries — represented the supreme achievement of the Chinese poetic tradition, and that subsequent poetry (including the poetry of the Song dynasty in which Yan Yu himself lived) had declined because it had been corrupted by two tendencies: the tendency toward intellectual argumentation (以文字为诗, "making poetry out of prose") and the tendency toward pedantic allusion (以才学为诗, "making poetry out of learning").

Yan Yu argued that the essence of great poetry lies not in learning, not in intellectual content, and not in moral purpose, but in what he called miaowu (妙悟, "marvelous enlightenment" or "ineffable insight") — a quality of intuitive understanding and imaginative vision that is analogous to the enlightenment sought by the Chan (Zen) Buddhist practitioner. Great poetry, in Yan Yu's view, is poetry that captures a moment of direct, unmediated perception — a moment in which the poet sees through the surface of things to their hidden essence — and that communicates this perception to the reader not through explanation or argument but through the suggestive power of images and the evocative resonance of language. Yan Yu compared the poet's art to the archer who hits the target without aiming, or to the swimmer who navigates the current without thinking — activities in which the highest skill manifests itself as effortless spontaneity.

Yan Yu's theory was profoundly shaped by Chan Buddhist thought, and his use of Chan concepts and Chan methods (particularly the emphasis on intuitive insight over discursive reasoning, and the use of paradox and indirection as pedagogical tools) to articulate a theory of poetic excellence was one of the most original and most consequential moves in the history of Chinese literary criticism. His theory was also deeply controversial: later critics accused him of mystifying the poetic art, of substituting vague metaphors for rigorous analysis, and of promoting a theory that was useful for appreciating great poetry but useless for guiding the aspiring poet in the production of good poetry. Nevertheless, Yan Yu's insistence on the primacy of intuitive insight, his valorization of suggestiveness and indirection over explicit statement, and his advocacy of the High Tang as the supreme model of poetic achievement had an enduring impact on Chinese poetic criticism and on the way Chinese poets and readers thought about the nature of poetic excellence.

7. Jin Shengtan and the Criticism of Fiction and Drama

The history of Chinese literary criticism has been dominated, for the most part, by the criticism of poetry — a reflection of the supreme status of poetry in the Chinese literary hierarchy. But the Ming and Qing dynasties saw the emergence of a tradition of critical commentary on fiction and drama that was, in its own way, equally sophisticated and equally consequential. The most important and the most influential figure in this tradition was Jin Shengtan (金圣叹, 1610–1661), a brilliant and idiosyncratic critic whose commentaries on the novel Water Margin (水浒传, Shuihu zhuan) and the drama The Western Wing (西厢记, Xixiang ji) transformed the way Chinese readers understood and appreciated these works and established the critical vocabulary and the critical methods that would be used to analyze Chinese fiction and drama for centuries.

Jin Shengtan's critical method was, in many respects, anticipatory of the methods of modern narratology and close reading. He paid meticulous attention to the techniques of narrative construction — the management of plot, the development of character, the use of foreshadowing and retrospection, the manipulation of narrative tempo and narrative perspective — and he analyzed these techniques with a precision and a sophistication that were unprecedented in Chinese literary criticism. His commentaries on Water Margin — which included detailed analyses of individual chapters, discussions of the novel's overall structure and design, and assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of different characters and episodes — revealed the novel to be a work of deliberate artistic construction rather than a naive or artless compilation of folk tales, and they elevated the critical reputation of Water Margin from a work of popular entertainment to a masterpiece of literary art.

Jin Shengtan's critical system was organized around the concept of fa (法, "method" or "technique") — the principle that great literature is distinguished not merely by its content (its themes, its moral vision, its emotional power) but by the technical virtuosity with which that content is organized and presented. He identified and analyzed a wide range of literary techniques — including what he called caoxian fa (草蛇灰线法, "the method of the grass snake and the ash line"), which referred to the technique of planting subtle foreshadowing threads that would not become apparent until later in the narrative, and beimian fu fen fa (背面敷粉法, "the method of applying powder to the back of the face"), which referred to the technique of characterizing a person by describing their effect on others rather than describing them directly.

Jin Shengtan's influence on the development of Chinese critical theory was immense. By demonstrating that fiction and drama could be subjected to the same kind of rigorous and detailed critical analysis that had previously been reserved for poetry, he broke down the traditional hierarchy that had placed poetry at the summit of the literary arts and had relegated fiction and drama to a lower status. His critical methods — his attention to narrative technique, his sensitivity to the nuances of characterization, his insistence on the deliberate artistry of great fiction — anticipated the methods of modern literary criticism by more than two centuries and established a critical tradition that would be continued and developed by the great Qing commentators on The Story of the Stone (红楼梦, Hongloumeng) and other works of Chinese fiction.

8. Wang Guowei and the Encounter with Western Aesthetics

Wang Guowei (王国维, 1877–1927) is a pivotal figure in the history of Chinese literary criticism — the first major Chinese critic to engage systematically with Western philosophy and aesthetics and to attempt a synthesis of Chinese and Western critical thought. Wang Guowei's work marks the beginning of the modern period in Chinese literary criticism — the period in which the indigenous Chinese critical tradition encountered the critical and philosophical traditions of the West and was transformed, enriched, and challenged by that encounter.

Wang Guowei's most influential critical work is the Renjian cihua (人间词话, Remarks on Ci Poetry from the Human World, 1908–1909) — a collection of short critical observations on the ci poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties that is written in the traditional Chinese critical form of the shihua (诗话, "remarks on poetry") but that incorporates concepts drawn from the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The central concept of the Renjian cihua is jingjie (境界, "realm" or "world") — a term that Wang Guowei uses to denote the totality of the imaginative world created by a poem, the fusion of the poet's inner emotional state with the external scene or situation that the poem describes. Wang Guowei distinguished between two types of jingjie: the youwo zhi jing (有我之境, "realm with a self"), in which the poet's emotions are projected onto the external world and color the description of landscape and nature with the poet's subjective feeling; and the wuwo zhi jing (无我之境, "realm without a self"), in which the poet achieves a state of self-forgetfulness and contemplates the external world with a disinterested clarity that is free from the distortions of personal emotion. Wang Guowei's concept of jingjie draws on both Chinese and Western sources — on the Chinese critical tradition of Sikong Tu and Yan Yu, which emphasized the suggestive and the evocative qualities of poetry, and on the Schopenhauerian concept of aesthetic contemplation as a form of release from the tyranny of the will — and it represents one of the most successful attempts at a genuine synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetic thought.

Wang Guowei also produced an influential study of Chinese drama, Song and Yuan Drama (宋元戏曲考, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 1912), which was the first scholarly study to apply modern critical methods to the analysis of Chinese dramatic literature and which argued for the artistic merit and the cultural significance of the Yuan drama — a literary form that had been disdained by the traditional Chinese literary establishment as a vulgar and inferior genre. Wang Guowei's championing of the Yuan drama — and his insistence that the criteria for evaluating literary merit should be based on aesthetic quality rather than on social status or generic hierarchy — represented a significant departure from the traditional Chinese literary order and anticipated the broader revaluation of Chinese literary genres that would be carried out by the May Fourth critics.

9. The Wenqi, Yijing, and Shengyun Traditions

The history of Chinese literary criticism is organized around a set of core concepts — wenqi (文气, "literary qi"), yijing (意境, "artistic conception" or "the realm of meaning and scene"), and shengyun (声韵 or 神韵, "tonal resonance" or "spiritual resonance") — that have served as the foundations of Chinese aesthetic thought and that have no precise equivalents in Western critical vocabulary. An understanding of these concepts is essential to an appreciation of the Chinese critical tradition and of the ways in which that tradition differs from the Western tradition of literary criticism.

Wenqi (文气) — the concept that literature is animated by a vital force or vital energy that is an expression of the writer's own vital force — is one of the oldest and most fundamental concepts in Chinese literary criticism. First articulated by Cao Pi in the third century CE, the concept of wenqi links literary quality to the personality and the temperament of the writer in a way that is distinctively Chinese. The "qi" of a literary work — its energy, its rhythm, its texture, its momentum — is understood to be a direct expression of the writer's own "qi," and the assessment of literary quality is therefore, in part, an assessment of the quality of the writer's vital force. This concept implies that literary excellence cannot be achieved through technical skill alone — that great literature requires a greatness of spirit, a largeness of personality, and a vitality of temperament that no amount of training or practice can produce if they are not innately present.

Yijing (意境) — the concept of the "artistic conception" or the "realm of meaning and scene" — is a concept that emerged gradually in Chinese critical thought and that was given its fullest theoretical articulation by Wang Guowei in the early twentieth century. The concept of yijing refers to the fusion of the subjective (意, yi, "meaning," "intent," or "emotion") and the objective (境, jing, "scene," "situation," or "environment") in a literary work — the creation of an imaginative world in which inner feeling and outer landscape are so thoroughly integrated that they cannot be separated. The concept of yijing implies that the greatest poetry is poetry that creates a self-contained world of meaning and emotion — a world that the reader can enter and inhabit, and that communicates its significance not through explicit statement but through the total effect of the poem's imagery, its language, its rhythm, and its atmosphere.

Shengyun (神韵, "spiritual resonance") — a concept most fully developed by the Qing poet-critic Wang Shizhen (王士禛, 1634–1711) — refers to the indefinable quality of suggestiveness, of resonance beyond what is explicitly said, that characterizes the finest poetry. Wang Shizhen's theory of shengyun emphasized that the highest poetry is poetry that leaves something unsaid — that creates a space of silence and implication beyond the words on the page, and that invites the reader to complete the poem's meaning through an act of imaginative participation. This emphasis on the unsaid, the implied, and the suggestive — on what is between and beyond the words rather than in the words themselves — is one of the most distinctive and one of the most valued qualities of the Chinese poetic tradition, and it reflects an aesthetic sensibility that is profoundly shaped by the Daoist and Chan Buddhist traditions, with their emphasis on the limitations of language and the superiority of direct, intuitive apprehension over discursive statement.

These three concepts — wenqi, yijing, and shengyun — do not constitute a unified or systematic theory of literature, but they represent three fundamental dimensions of the Chinese understanding of literary art: the dimension of creative energy and personality (wenqi), the dimension of imaginative world-creation (yijing), and the dimension of suggestive resonance and ineffable meaning (shengyun). Together, they provide a framework for understanding what makes Chinese literature distinctive and what Chinese critics have valued most in their literary tradition.

10. The Encounter with Western Literary Theory

The encounter between the Chinese critical tradition and Western literary theory — which began in the late nineteenth century with the work of reformers and scholars such as Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929), who advocated the use of fiction as a vehicle for social reform and who drew on Western ideas about the social function of literature, and which accelerated dramatically in the twentieth century — has been one of the most consequential intellectual developments in the modern history of Chinese literary culture.

The May Fourth generation of Chinese critics and scholars — including Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren (周作人, 1885–1967), and Zhu Guangqian (朱光潜, 1897–1986) — engaged intensively with Western literary theory and aesthetics, drawing on the traditions of European Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism to critique and to transform the Chinese literary tradition. Hu Shi's advocacy of the vernacular language and his call for a "literary revolution" were explicitly modeled on European literary precedents, and his critical writings drew on the ideas of John Dewey (his teacher at Columbia University) and other Western thinkers. Zhu Guangqian, who studied aesthetics in Edinburgh, London, Strasbourg, and Paris, produced a series of influential works — including On Beauty (谈美, Tan mei, 1932) and A History of Western Aesthetics (西方美学史, Xifang meixue shi, 1963) — that introduced Chinese readers to the aesthetic theories of Kant, Hegel, Croce, and other Western thinkers and that attempted to place the Chinese aesthetic tradition in dialogue with its Western counterpart.

The establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 brought a new set of Western critical frameworks — specifically, the Marxist literary theory that had been developed by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and their Soviet followers — to a position of dominance in Chinese literary criticism. The Marxist approach to literature — which emphasized the relationship between literary production and the economic and social conditions of the society in which it was produced, which insisted on the class character of literature, and which judged literary works by their political content and their service to the revolutionary cause — became the official critical orthodoxy of the People's Republic and exerted a profound influence on the way Chinese literature was produced, interpreted, and evaluated for more than three decades.

Mao Zedong's Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话, Zai Yan'an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua, 1942) — which articulated the principle that literature and art should serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and that political criteria should take precedence over artistic criteria in the evaluation of literary works — became the foundational text of literary criticism in the People's Republic and established a framework for literary evaluation that was enforced, with varying degrees of strictness, throughout the Mao era and beyond.

The post-Mao era — and particularly the 1980s, a decade of extraordinary intellectual openness and cultural ferment in China — saw a rapid and wide-ranging engagement with Western literary theories that had been inaccessible during the Mao era. Structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, reader-response theory, new historicism, feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, and a wide range of other Western critical approaches were introduced to Chinese scholars and critics in rapid succession, creating a period of intense intellectual excitement but also of intellectual confusion, as Chinese critics struggled to assimilate, to evaluate, and to apply these diverse and often contradictory theoretical frameworks.

11. Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory

The landscape of Chinese literary criticism and theory in the twenty-first century is characterized by an unprecedented diversity and an unprecedented self-consciousness about the relationship between indigenous and imported critical traditions. The three major strands of contemporary Chinese literary theory — Marxist criticism (which remains the officially sanctioned critical framework in the People's Republic, though its influence on actual critical practice has diminished significantly), Western-derived critical theory (which dominates the university departments of literature and comparative literature), and the revival of indigenous Chinese critical categories and methods — coexist in a relationship that is sometimes complementary, sometimes competitive, and sometimes contradictory.

The revival of interest in the indigenous Chinese critical tradition — a development that has been driven in part by the broader "national studies" (国学, guoxue) movement, which seeks to recover and to revalue the intellectual achievements of pre-modern Chinese civilization — has led to a renewed scholarly engagement with the works of Liu Xie, Sikong Tu, Yan Yu, Jin Shengtan, Wang Guowei, and other major figures of the Chinese critical tradition. Scholars such as Cao Shunqing (曹顺庆, born 1954), who has argued for the development of a "Chinese School" (中国学派) of literary theory that is grounded in indigenous Chinese critical categories rather than in imported Western ones, have challenged the dominance of Western critical frameworks and have called for a critical practice that is better suited to the distinctive characteristics of Chinese literary texts.

The question of whether Chinese literary criticism should be based on indigenous Chinese categories or on imported Western categories — or on some synthesis of the two — is one of the most debated and most consequential questions in contemporary Chinese intellectual life. Those who advocate a return to indigenous critical categories argue that the uncritical adoption of Western theoretical frameworks has distorted the understanding of Chinese literature and has led Chinese critics to ask questions of Chinese texts that the texts were never designed to answer. Those who advocate the continued use of Western theoretical frameworks argue that literary criticism, like science, is a universal enterprise that transcends cultural boundaries, and that the insights of Western literary theory are as applicable to Chinese literature as they are to Western literature. Those who advocate a synthesis argue that the most productive approach is one that draws on both traditions — using the conceptual precision and the analytical rigor of Western theory to illuminate aspects of Chinese literature that the indigenous tradition may have overlooked, while using the insights and the sensitivities of the indigenous tradition to correct the biases and the blind spots of Western theory.

The work of scholars such as Zhang Longxi (张隆溪, born 1947), who has argued eloquently for a comparative approach to literary criticism that recognizes both the commonalities and the differences between Chinese and Western critical traditions, and Liu Kang (刘康, born 1956), who has explored the relationship between Marxist aesthetics and Chinese literary theory, represents some of the most intellectually ambitious and most culturally significant critical work being produced in the contemporary Chinese literary world.

12. Conclusion: The Ongoing Dialogue

The history of Chinese literary criticism and aesthetics, viewed as a whole, reveals a tradition of extraordinary richness, depth, and continuity — a tradition that has engaged with the fundamental questions of literary art with a seriousness and a sophistication that are matched by only a handful of other critical traditions in the world. From the "Great Preface" to the Shijing, which articulated the foundational principles of the Confucian approach to poetry, through the great works of Liu Xie, Sikong Tu, Yan Yu, and Jin Shengtan, to the modern encounter with Western aesthetics and the contemporary efforts to synthesize indigenous and imported critical traditions, Chinese literary criticism has been a living tradition — a tradition that has continuously evolved in response to new literary developments, new intellectual challenges, and new cultural circumstances.

The central achievement of the Chinese critical tradition — the achievement that distinguishes it most clearly from the Western critical tradition and that constitutes its most valuable contribution to the global conversation about literature and the arts — is its development of a set of aesthetic concepts and critical methods that are rooted in the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese language, the Chinese literary system, and the Chinese philosophical traditions, and that illuminate aspects of literary art that Western critical frameworks may not fully capture. The concepts of wenqi, yijing, and shengyun; the evocative critical method of Sikong Tu; the intuitive aesthetics of Yan Yu; the narrative analysis of Jin Shengtan; the synthesis of Chinese and Western thought achieved by Wang Guowei — these are contributions to the understanding of literature that are of value not only to students of Chinese literature but to anyone who is interested in the nature and the possibilities of literary art.

The future of Chinese literary criticism will be shaped by the ongoing dialogue between the indigenous Chinese critical tradition and the critical traditions of the wider world — a dialogue that has the potential to enrich both sides and to produce new modes of critical understanding that are adequate to the complexity and the diversity of the world's literary traditions. The Chinese critical tradition, with its distinctive concepts, its distinctive methods, and its distinctive insights, has much to offer to this dialogue — and the dialogue, in turn, has much to offer to the continued vitality and the continued development of the Chinese critical tradition.

References

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History of Chinese Literature

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