Ancient Chinese Literature

Poetry is one of the earliest forms of art produced in Chinese literature, and the Book of Songs is the earliest general collection of poems, the earliest of which was produced in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the latest in the mid-Spring and Autumn Period. Immediately afterward, a new poetic form, Ch'u Ch'iu, emerged, and the glorious representative of Ch'u Ch'iu was the great poet Qu Yuan. The Guofeng (国风) of the Book of Songs and the Chu Rhetoric (楚辞) represented by the Li Sao (离骚) are two models of ancient Chinese poetry. In terms of compositional method, the Guofeng and Li Sao inaugurated the poetic traditions of realism and romanticism in Chinese literature, respectively. During the Six Dynasties of the Han Dynasty and Wei Dynasty, a new style of poetry with the robust and fresh style of folk literature, the Lefu, appeared, and a strong sense of realism was an important hallmark of the Lefu. The Stranger's Mulberry, Southeast Flight of the Peacock, and the Mulan Poem are among the treasures of ancient China's long narrative poems. During the development of the Lefu poems, the pentameter and heptameter stanzas became more and more striking, and by the end of the Han Dynasty, with the emergence of the Nineteen Ancient Poems, the pentameter poems as a poetic form had basically matured. Seven-character poems came into being later than five-character poems, and they became widely popular around the time of the Jin and Song dynasties. After the full preparation of Yongming-style poetry in terms of sound and rhythm, represented by Shen Yao during the Qi and Liang Dynasties, the Tang Dynasty saw the heyday of proximity poetry. In this period, the ancient and proximate poems developed comprehensively, and world-famous great poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi appeared.

Chinese poetry has a very close relationship with music. The development of the relationship between the two has gone through three stages: music from poetry, poetry from music and lyrics from music. The lyrics are a more advanced combination of poetry and music after a long period of development and evolution under the new historical conditions. Lyrics, a kind of musical literary style, originated from the folk, and after the Tang Dynasty, it became a trend for literati to fill in lyrics. During the Five Dynasties, China's first collection of literati words, the Flower Room Collection, was published. In the Song Dynasty, the realistic content and expressive form of the word reached the degree of perfect unity, and it became another peak of Chinese literature that can be ranked with Tang poetry, and a large number of outstanding wordsmiths, such as Su Shi, appeared. In the late Southern Song Dynasty, words gradually lost their ability to harmonize with music. The new style of poetry formed by combining Hu music with northern folk slang and popularized language, the prose song, aroused new interest. Prose songs absorbed a lot of folk dialects and slangs, had a strong color of civic literature, and had the wit and humor rarely seen in previous poems, injecting a breath of fresh air into the poetry world. Prose songs developed rapidly in the Yuan Dynasty and became one of the most flourishing genres in the history of Chinese poetry. After the rise of Song lyrics and Yuanqu, traditional poems were still being written, and each generation of Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing left a large number of poems, and each with its own characteristics, but the total achievements did not exceed those of the Tang Dynasty.

Prose

In the traditional Chinese conception of literature, alongside poetry and lyrics, it is the prose that is the authentic form of literature . The first collection of narratives and essays in Chinese literary history was the Shangshu, a compilation of ancient historical documents and some writings that recounted ancient events. Though the text was difficult to read, it was already capable of narrating, and it had begun to take on literary qualities. During the Warring States period, the wars were frequent, and the scholars had to give advice and write books to form a hundred schools of thought, and the prose was developed rapidly, mainly historical prose and the prose of the sons. Historical prose is represented by Zuo Zhuan, Guoyu, and Strategies of the Warring States, and plurals' prose is represented by Meng Zi, Zhuang Zi, Xun Zi, and Han Fei Zi. Confucianism and Taoism are the two main schools of thought in the history of Chinese thought, so the Analects, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi have the greatest influence in the history of literature. This period of prose, there are emotional excitement, argumentative, rhetoric, rigorous structure, more allegory, good use of metaphor and other characteristics, the basic form of prose has been determined. The prose of the Han Dynasty paid more attention to literary elegance, and the number of couplets increased, with the tendency of rhetoric. At this time appeared Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian". This masterpiece is grand in scale and rigorous in structure, whether it is writing scenes and objects, or portraying characters, lyricism and discussion, all of them are very successful. Therefore, Shiji is not only regarded as a masterpiece of history, but also a model of Chinese biography. After the flourishing of ekphrasis, prose declined. It was not until the Tang Dynasty, when Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan vigorously advocated the ancient language and opposed the overly pretentious and hollowed-out parallelism, that prose regained its vitality and status. Tang and Song dynasty ancient literature, directly inherited the Qin and Han traditions, especially the travelogue prose is fresh and elegant, lively and vivid. Later generations of pure literary prose has been along this track. Ming and qing dynasty small essays are an important style of pure literary prose, which absorbs the essence of Tang dynasty prose, and integrates the harmonic and timelessness of Wei, Jin, and North and South Dynasties' note-writing, and has a unique artistic charm. Fugue and parallel writing are two genres between poetry and prose in Chinese literature. Fu originated from Chu Rhetoric, popular in the two Han Dynasty, has the rhyme of poetry, and advocates the spreading and Yang Li. Elegant prose flourished in the Wei, Jin, and North and South Dynasties, pursuing neat sentences, emphasizing the stability of counterpoint and rhythmic harmony, but not requiring rhyme.

Novels and operas

In China's traditional conception of literature, novels were often regarded as the talk of the town; operas were regarded as works that could not be presented in the hall of elegance. Therefore, the novel and opera started late, until the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties before the rapid development of some great writers and works appeared one after another, opera, such as the Yuan Dynasty Guan Hanqing's "Dou'e Grievance", Wang Shifu's "The West Wing", the Ming Dynasty Tang Xianzu's "Peony Pavilion", the Qing Dynasty, Kong Shangren's "Peach Blossom Fan" and so on, are all monumental; novels "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin," "Journey to the West", "Liao Zhai Zhi Yi", "Liao Lin Wai Shi", etc. The Dream of the Red Chamber is a monumental work. The Dream of the Red Chamber is a monumental work, which pushes Chinese literature to a new peak and is comparable to many well-known novels in the world.

Ancient Chinese literature, though constantly evolving, showed an unusually stable and solidified character, and compared with Western literature, unity and homogeneity were quite obvious. This characteristic is closely related to the historical process of Chinese society. Most of Chinese literature arose in the small productive soil of feudal society, and it has almost always developed in a centralized and unified state, in which cultural ideas were valued and strictly controlled. Therefore, ancient Chinese literature had relatively little contact with foreign literature, and most of the time it was in a closed environment, and, except for special historical periods, generally speaking, it had a rather distant relationship with religion. This formed the character of ancient Chinese literature, which was solid and steady, and began to break down in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century with the beginning of the major changes in the feudal society of China. The authentic poetry and literature of ancient Chinese literature, by the middle of the Qing Dynasty, was mostly due to the inheritance of the old art forms and the lack of new ideological content and towards the end. After the opium wars, part of the intellectuals began to realize the economic and cultural weaknesses of the nation, literature appeared Gong Zizhen, Huang Zunxian and other representatives of the enlightenment; Hundred Days' Reform Movement before and after the bourgeoisie reformist representative Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian and other representatives of the poetic revolution, the literary revolution, novels and other revolutionary ideas, demanded that the "reverence for the vernacular and the abolition of the written word "Political novels calling for revolution were also produced one after another, such as Li Baojia's The Present Condition of Officialdom, Wu Woyao's Twenty Years of Witnessing Strange Present Situations, Liu Osprey's Journey to the Old Remnant, and Zeng Pu's Sinful Sea Flowers, all of which were condemnatory novels exposing the darkness of the society at that time. At the same time, a group of patriotic poets, represented by Liu Yazi and Qiu Jin, whose works for the salvation of the country formed a new literary trend in modern literature.

The May Fourth New Culture Movement brought Chinese literature into the glorious modern period. Literature in this period has become conscious, independent and art oriented to the whole society. It took changing the language of literature as a breakthrough (replacing the literary language with the vernacular), and carried out comprehensive and profound changes in the form, methods of expression, and content of literature, producing new poems, prose, novels, and dramas that were different from those of traditional literature, as well as introducing and creating new genres such as prose poems, reportage literature, and cinematic literature, etc., and strengthening the individuality of the subject of creativity, his self-consciousness, and the depth and breadth of the socialization of the objects of his depiction, like never before. The individuality and self-consciousness of the creative subject and the depth and breadth of the socialization of the depicted object have been strengthened as never before. Concern for human destiny and the fate of the people and the nation, and the modern democratic and socialist currents of thought became the ideological basis of the new literary trend. The national crisis, the path of the intellectuals, the sufferings of the peasants, resistance and liberation, and armed struggle were common themes of works. Writers had a wider and more intimate communication with their readers, and also drew more extensively on the new currents of world literature. It was through the nationalization of foreign influences and the modernization of literary traditions that a new national literature was created and became a conscious member of modern world literature. The literature of this period made brilliant achievements, and a number of world writers such as Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, and Mao Dun appeared . Lu Xun's highly thought-provoking and artistic novels such as The Diary of a Madman, The True Story of Ah Q, The Blessing, and Medicine, as well as a large number of miscellaneous essays, created the greatest milestone in modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun, the great flag-bearer of China's new literary movement, has had an extremely far-reaching impact on the Chinese people with his works.