EALC 200: Approaches to the Study of East Asian Cultures (HC/BMC) Spring 2017: China

The History offers both an integrated narrative, situating literature in its larger cultural context, and an overview of the key developments of the past millennia accessible to non-specialist readers as well as scholars and students of Chinese.

The Columbia History of Chinese Literature is a comprehensive yet portable guide to China's vast literary traditions. Stretching from earliest times to the present, the text features original contributions by leading specialists working in all genres and periods. Chapters cover poetry, prose, fiction, and drama, and consider such contextual subjects as popular culture, the impact of religion, the role of women, and China's relationship with non-Sinitic languages and peoples. Opening with a major section on the linguistic and intellectual foundations of Chinese literature, the anthology traces the development of forms and movements over time, along with critical trends, and pays particular attention to the premodern canon.

A history of Chinese literature from its early beginnings through the end of the Qing dynasty, this recent work from Professor Luo Yuming of China s Fudan University seeks to provide, by adopting new theoretical perspectives and using updated research, a coherent, panoramic description of the development of Chinese literature and its major characteristics. As one of the very few English translations of such works by Chinese authors it seeks to inform the Western audience of the recent viewpoints and scholarship on the topic from a leading Chinese scholar. It may also provide some grounds of comparison and contrast with equivalent works in the West.

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. 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.

This extraordinary one-volume guide to the modern literatures of China, Japan, and Korea is the definitive reference work on the subject in the English language and is an essential starting point for the study of East Asian literatures.

History that covers the 1950s through the 1990s. An interesting feature is the "Chronology of Contemporary Literature in China" that starts on page 451.