A surprisingly good little book. Every time I think I'm done with the VSI series, I find something like this. Knight tries to have a narrative; she deals with contemporary hot-buttons without letting said hot-buttons overwhelm the fact that a VSI has to actually, you know, introduce its subject matter rather than just complain about it; she deals with most of the books you've heard of and probably a few you haven't. Also, it's nicely written. I have no idea why people are complaining about it so; accusing a VSI of being superficial is like complaining about the OED being exhaustive.

Two slight problems: the 'twentieth century' chapter is just a bunch of plot summaries, and of books that don't sound even remotely interesting. I wish she'd done the narrative thing here, too, because there's an obvious one: when literature is used to bolster idiotic ideologies (Maoism) or attack idiotic ideologies (Maoism), it's usually pretty boring. When it's used to bolster or criticize even remotely intelligent ideologies (Confucian traditionalism), on the other hand, literature can get pretty good.

Also, there's just too much silly "unlike western poetry, which is obsessed with logic/reason/individualism/the self, Chinese poetry deals sensitively and subtly with intuition/emotion/other people/the universe." The Chinese tradition does a nice job dealing with these oppositions; to just say it goes to one side while 'the west' (which presumably borders 'the north'?) goes to the other does a disservice to everyone. ( )

My interest in Chinese literature is primarily contemporary fiction, but I still found this little book very interesting. As you can see from the table of contents, it traces the foundations of modern literature in an intriguing way:
1.Foundations: ethics, parables and fish
2.Poetry and poetics: landscapes, allusions and alcohol
3.Classical narrative: history, jottings, and tales of the strange
4.Vernacular drama and fiction: gardens, bandits and dreams
5.Modern literature: trauma, movements and bus stops

NB Throughout the text, the author uses Chinese characters (logograms) and Romanised Chinese as well as English. I can’t reproduce the logograms, but have included the Romanised Chinese in excerpts I have quoted.

The fish in chapter one come from an ancient text in which the legendary sage Zhuangzi (369-286 BCE) has a conversation about the happiness of fish with the logician Huizi. But this is far from the oldest text still extant:

The antiquity of early Chinese texts is astounding by Western standards. Although modern Chinese differs from early Chinese as much as English differs from Latin, experts today can still read the Chinese inscribed on tortoise shells and sheep scapulae dating from the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BCE). Used for divination, these oracle bone inscriptions asked questions composed of individual characters (zi), the answers to which were divined by interpreting cracks when the bones were heated over fire.

These characters became the foundation of Chinese culture. Although their forms and meanings evolved over time, modern Chinese still uses characters from ancient texts, and the continuity of the writing system has been crucial in helping China’s central traditions to cohere. (p.3)

Knight says that China’s survival over three thousand years may owe more to its literary traditions than to its political history. Its unity derives, she says, from faith in the power of writing (wen) and writing played a crucial role in civil practice, nourishing cultural harmony.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/08/24/chinese-literature-a-very-short-introduction... ( )

This is a great book that does just what it says it would. It gives a brief introduction to Chinese literature for the last 2000-plus years. That is such a broad topic that it can't go into any detail, so it identifies the major genres and gives some of the most important works from each. It is meant as a launching point if you want to learn more about a particular genre or era of literature and it does a great job of that. You won't be an expert when you finish but you will know some of the important trends and works throughout Chinese history. This book is one of the best of the series in that regard. ( )