The Cambridge History Of Chinese Literature

Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese at Harvard University. --Book Jacket.

Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese at Harvard University. --Book Jacket.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China provides a survey of the institutional and cultural history of pre-imperial China.

International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.

A wide-ranging and accessibly written guide to the key aspects of elite and popular culture in contemporary China.

This book systematically discusses the academic connotations of the concept of Modern Chinese Literature, as well as its basic categories. The discipline founded upon this concept is influential both in China and throughout the world, and scholars engaged in teaching and research in this field number around ten thousand. The discipline was originally established in haste in an abnormal academic environment, and, with the passage of time, such derivative disciplines as Contemporary Chinese Literature, 20th Century Chinese Literature, the Literature of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and World Chinese Literature have appeared. This book argues that these fields should be united in the area of New Literature in Chinese, because they have a shared language, culture and tradition. In todays multi-polar world, where Chinese literature is so diversified, such an approach is obviously helpful.

"Since it focuses on the "development" of modern Chinese literature, it shall be open-ended and ever extending, and nobody has the right to put an end to it. Written as a single-volume literary history, and with illustrations added, the space is quite limited. And since scholars have already expanded the literary history of this period into a much broader one, the author must find some key points that may best represent each period. In this book, he consciously cut down narratives about authors and tried not to cover all their literary works, but give a detailed analysis of typical representative works, in which process the lack and neglect of some major authors and works are unavoidable. Maybe this is a writing method worth trying, and this book may provide both positive and negative experience for future scholars who try to write ever more concise and focused literary histories"--

The Six Dynasties Period (220-589 CE) is one of the most complex in Chinese history. Written by leading scholars from across the globe, the essays in this volume cover nearly every aspect of the period, including politics, foreign relations, warfare, agriculture, gender, art, philosophy, material culture, local society, and music. While acknowledging the era's political chaos, these essays indicate that this was a transformative period when Chinese culture was significantly changed and enriched by foreign peoples and ideas. It was also a time when history and literature became recognized as independent subjects and religion was transformed by the domestication of Buddhism and the formation of organized Daoism. Many of the trends that shaped the rest of imperial China's history have their origins in this era, such as the commercial vibrancy of southern China, the separation of history and literature from classical studies, and the growing importance of women in politics and religion.