Part of Series
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. From ancient historical records through the modernization and globalization of Chinese literature, 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. The book includes Chinese characters for names, titles, and key terms.
Author
Sabina Knight (桑稟華) seeks to bring Chinese literatures to broader audiences. Her Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012) tells the story of literary culture’s key role in the development and resilience of Chinese social and political institutions. From ancient historical records through the region’s early modernization and globalization, the book embraces traditional Chinese understandings of literature as encompassing history and philosophy as well as poetry and poetics, storytelling, drama and the novel. Knight's earlier book, *The Heart of Time* (2006), offers a history of modern Chinese fiction to explore how narrative structures, representations of time, and understandings of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the 20th century. *https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5... Working in Chinese, Russian, French and English, Knight also teaches and writes in the cross-cultural medical humanities. Her talks and articles have addressed breast cancer, emotions, disability, aging and well-being. This work builds on 10 years’ participation in a faculty seminar sponsored by Harvard’s departments of medical anthropology and social medicine. Knight continues as a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Knight has translated stories, essays, classical poetry and modern prose. She has published essays in Chinese on Chinese-English literary translation, and she has spoken widely on the topic in China, Europe and the United States. Her hope that literary culture may be relevant to contemporary questions of law, public policy and healthcare has grown since she began in 2011 as a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program (PIP) of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR). In 2007, Knight was awarded Smith’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.
