What is pre-Qin literature?

Pre-Qin literature refers to a literary phenomenon that experienced the initial formation of primitive society, slave society and feudal society (late Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period) from ancient times to the unification of Qin (22 1). This is the era of China literature and the source of China literature.

There were human activities in China as early as two million years ago, and then in the long primitive times, our ancestors developed many places such as the Yellow River Basin, the Yangtze River Basin and the Pearl River Basin. Through labor practice, they promoted their own evolution, developed their thinking, produced language and created human spiritual civilization. According to archaeological findings, at the latest in the Yangshao and Longshan cultural era five or six thousand years ago, China's fine arts, music and other arts have gradually separated from production and moved towards independence. At the same time, literature, a closely related language art, came into being. Literature in primitive society is mainly ballads and myths. Poetry is the earliest literary style, which was created by primitive ancestors in activities such as labor and sacrifice. Ancestors formed their belief in natural gods in the Stone Age, and clan society formed the concept of ancestral gods. When offering sacrifices, hunting, farming and harvesting, they must sing and dance, and the accompanying rhythm of praising beauty and praying is a form of primitive songs. At the same time, the ancestors deified the natural force and tried to explain, conquer and dominate it with the help of imagination, thus creating a myth. Primitive literature highlights the contradiction between man and nature, and a few take social contradictions as the theme, which may be produced in the late primitive society. The original documents are oral and collective, and were modified, deleted and misinterpreted by later generations in the process of circulation.

Slave society was formed in summer and collapsed in the late Spring and Autumn Period. There were already formed characters in Xia dynasty, but in Shang dynasty, the characters became more and more mature, which had a great influence on literature. From the hexagrams of Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Yin Zhouwen, Zhouyi and Shangshu unearthed in various places, we can see the development process of China's prose clauses from chapter to chapter, from chapter to chapter, and from recording to reasoning. Poetry is the main achievement of Zhou Wenxue. The Book of Songs is the earliest extant collection of poems in China. Except for a few works such as Ode to Shang Dynasty, which may be works before the Zhou Dynasty, the rest were produced from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, which widely and profoundly reflected the history and reality of the Zhou Dynasty, with rich content, sincere feelings, simple style, diverse techniques and beautiful language, laying a solid foundation for the excellent realistic tradition of China's poetry. It marks the completion of pre-Qin poetry from oral to written, from folk to court, and also reflects the transition of pre-Qin poetry from collective creation to individual creation.

From the end of the Spring and Autumn Period to the Warring States Period, the feudal society was initially established. At this time, the creation of historical prose has been very developed, whether in chronological order or in different countries. These historical works not only summed up the success or failure of the country, but also promoted the development of prose. Spring and Autumn Annals is just a short memorabilia. In Zuo Zhuan and Guoyu, there are concrete plots, realistic dialogues and smiles of characters. The Warring States Policy describes the characters' demeanor and character with exaggerated brushwork and ingenious plot. They created the tradition of combining authenticity with vividness, and provided important experience and rich themes for the creation of essays, novels and plays in later generations. Due to the loss of the emperor's power, the princes competed for hegemony, the scholar class rose, and private lectures and writings flourished. At this time, many thinkers and politicians emerged. They represent different classes and groups, hold different views and argue with each other, forming a situation in which a hundred schools of thought contend. Their main extant works are The Analects of Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Neither donkey nor horse, and Lv Chunqiu. These works push China's argumentative essays from short records to dialogue debates and then to thematic papers, and attach great importance to logic and language skills, and use a lot of rhetorical devices such as fables and metaphors, parallelism, exaggeration and contrast. Xun Kuang also wrote "Fu Pian" in the form of argot, which opened a precedent of reasoning and praising things. Prose, poetry in this period is mainly represented by Qu Yuan's Songs of the South. It is the product of the integration of southern Chu culture and central plains culture, and created a romantic new poetry school that embodies the realistic spirit of the Book of Songs. Its appearance marks the transformation of pre-Qin poetry from collective creation to individual creation. After Qu Yuan, Song Yu, He and others studied Qu Yuan's creation, making Chu Ci a literary genre divorced from music-Fu.

The colorful pre-Qin literature is the cornerstone of China literature, which not only created a variety of literary styles such as poetry, prose and fu, but also made a good start for the development of China's realistic and romantic literature.