Chinese literature
Formation of the earliest layer of Chinese literature was influenced by oral traditions of different social and professional provenance: cult and lay musical practices (Shijing),[2] divination (Yi jing, Guicang and Lianshan), astronomy, ritual (Etiquette and Ceremonial), exorcism, etc.
Sima Qian is often compared to the Greek Herodotus in scope and method, because he covered Chinese history from the mythical Xia dynasty until the contemporary reign of Emperor Wu of Han while retaining an objective and non-biased standpoint.
[11] The Cao family,[12] rulers of the Wei dynasty (220 – 265 AD) during the post-Han Three Kingdoms period, distinguished themselves as poets by writing poems filled with sympathy for the day-to-day struggles of soldiery and the common people.
[13] The landscape genre of Chinese nature poetry emerged under the brush of Xie Lingyun (385–433), as he innovated distinctively descriptive and complementary couplets composed of five-character lines.
[15] Toward the close of this period in which many later-developed themes were first experimented with, the Xiao family[16] of the Southern Liang dynasty (502–557) engaged in highly refined and often denigrated[17] court-style poetry lushly describing sensual delights as well as the description of objects.
[26] The free and expressive style of Song high culture has been contrasted with majestic Tang poems by centuries of subsequent critics who engage in fierce arguments over which dynasty had the best poetry.
[27] Additional musical influences contributed to the Yuan dynasty's (1279–1368) distinctive qu opera culture and spawned the sanqu form of individual poems based on it.
[29] Painter-poets, such as Shen Zhou (1427–1509), Tang Yin (1470–1524), Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), and Yun Shouping (1633–1690), created worthy conspicuous poems as they combined art, poetry and calligraphy with brush on paper.
[32] While China's later imperial period does not seem to have broken new ground for innovative approaches to poetry, picking through its vast body of preserved works remains a scholarly challenge, so new treasures may yet be restored from obscurity.
However, the poetry scene was still dominated by the adherents to the Tongguang School (named after the Tongzhi and Guangxu reigns of the Qing), whose leaders—Chen Yan (陳衍), Chen Sanli (陳三立), Zheng Xiaoxu (鄭孝胥), and Shen Zengzhi (沈曾植)—promoted a Song style in the manner of Huang Tingjian.
Modern poetry flourished especially in the 1930s, in the hands of poets like Zhu Xiang (朱湘), Dai Wangshu, Li Jinfa (李金發), Wen Yiduo, and Ge Xiao (葛蕭).
These writers generally tackled domestic issues, such as relations between the sexes, family, friendship and war, Eileen Chang's writing uses the spatial specificities of the modern apartment as essential to the construction of a vision of life in wartime.
In the Republican period, the female literary archetypes of the "New Woman" and the "Modern Girl" developed as a response to the Confucian ideal of "good wives" and "wise mothers.
By 1932 it had adopted the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism; that is, the insistence that art must concentrate on contemporary events in a realistic way, exposing the ills of nonsocialist society and promoting a glorious future under communism.
The "New Sensationists" (新感覺派)—a group of writers based in Shanghai who were influenced, to varying degrees, by Western and Japanese modernism—wrote fiction that was more concerned with the unconscious and with aesthetics than with politics or social problems.
Other writers, including Shen Congwen and Fei Ming (廢名), balked at the utilitarian role for literature by writing lyrical, almost nostalgic, depictions of the countryside.
Lin Yutang, who had studied at Harvard and Leipzig, introduced the concept of youmo (humor), which he used in trenchant criticism of China's political and cultural situation before leaving for the United States.
[45]: 165 As described by academic David Der-Wei Wang, "[R]evolution plus love functioned both as a literary trope, titillating and sustaining a society's desire for self-reform, and as a political mandate, calling for the redisposition of the social body in both public and personal spheres.
[45]: xvi Mao articulated five independent although related categories of creative consideration for socialist cultural production: (1) class stand, (2) attitude, (3) audience, (4) work style, and (5) popularization/massification.
Party cultural leaders such as Zhou Yang used Mao's call to have literature "serve the people" to mount attacks on "petty bourgeois idealism" and "humanitarianism".
Having learned the lessons of the anti-Hu Feng campaign, they were reluctant, but then a flurry of newspaper articles, films, and literary works drew attention to such problems as bureaucratism and authoritarianism within the ranks of the party.
[43]: 121 Academic Sarah Mellors Rodriguez writes that though these works of birth planning propaganda may seem trite to modern audiences, their themes spoke directly to widespread concerns among Chinese people at the time.
The only stage productions allowed were her "Eight Model Operas", which combined traditional and western forms, while great fanfare was given to politically orthodox films and heroic novels, such as those by Hao Ran (浩然).
[43]: 122 The arrest of Jiang Qing and the other members of the Gang of Four in 1976, and especially the reforms initiated at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress Central Committee in December 1978, led writers to take up their pens again.
Fiction writers such as Wang Meng, Zhang Xinxin, and Zong Pu and dramatists such as Gao Xingjian experimented with modernist language and narrative modes.
Other writers such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Su Tong experimented in a more avant-garde mode of writing that was daring in form and language and showed a complete loss of faith in ideals of any sort.
Some writers, such as Yan Lianke, continue to take seriously the role of literature in exposing social problems; his novel Dreams of Ding Village (丁庄梦) deals with the plight of HIV-AIDS victims.
Early milestones trace back to the late 1990s with sites like Under the Banyan Tree (榕树下) and influential works such as Cai Zhiheng's The First Intimate Contact on Taiwan's Bulletin Board System (BBS).
Chinese online literature today remains sustained by a user-driven economy where readers actively engage with and influence writers through comments, ratings, and monetary gifts.
[69] Internationally, platforms such as Wuxiaworld and Webnovel have brought Chinese genres like Xianxia and Wuxia to a global audience, leveraging translation teams and machine learning tools.
